


Nailed It

by Kangofu_CB, Lissadiane, Villainny (Nny)



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftercare, And Clint, Awesome Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Barnes is not, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Friends to Lovers, Light Bondage, M/M, Panic Attacks, Sex Toys, Shooting Competition, and lube, avengers themed sex toys, bonding with steve, bucky discovers the joys of the internet, clint barton is an 'adult entertainer', fanmail, homophobic language by like one dipshit commenter, mario kart as a coping mechanism, mentions of pegging, mysterious packages, pornhub videos, the avengers have side hustles, the news media sucks, vibe challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 14:37:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20341747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/pseuds/Kangofu_CB, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/pseuds/Villainny
Summary: “From GrrlTragic: Suddenly all the actual sex toys in the world disappear, what do you use in their place?”Bucky is grateful he’s locked his arm, because otherwise the camera would’ve tumbled straight out of his grip and onto the floor. He’s staring at Clint in shock but Clint doesn’t seem to notice, just laughing and setting the card aside as he continues to talk.ORWhat’s a little Wank Off Wednesday between friends?





	Nailed It

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time Lissa, Nny, and CB got together and thought _ we should do a collab, but of what_ and then someone said Sex Toys and then this fic was born!
> 
> You're welcome, fandom.

Bucky looks up as Clint stumbles into the common floor in the Tower, looking around in dismay.

“Where is everybody?” he asks.

“Assemblin’,” Bucky tells him. “Some kinda Mole Man incident in the subway or something.”

Clint pouts and Bucky gives him an unimpressed look. 

Bucky didn’t Assemble because he hasn’t got clearance from the SHIELD shrinks. 

_Clint_ didn’t Assemble because he’s still got his right wrist in a soft cast from falling out of a tree during their last excursion, and he’s also still got stitches -- as far as Bucky knows, assuming he hasn’t chewed them out of his own skin by now, jittery and neurotic as he gets with nothing to do -- along his flank. So when JARVIS had issued the alert, it hadn’t been piped into Clint’s quarters, and he can pout all he likes but it’s no one’s fault but his own. 

The team is long gone, anyway, has been for at least an hour. Bucky’s been trying to distract himself with a book, which isn’t working, and he’s already set up a half dozen alerts with JARVIS just in case Steve does something typically dumb. 

He feels a little jittery and neurotic himself.

“Everybody’s gone? Tasha too?” Clint checks, sounding slightly desperate.

“Yep.” Bucky turns a page he hasn’t read a word of, to see if the next one is more interesting. 

He can feel Clint’s eyes on him but he doesn’t look up to check. Bucky knows what he looks like, hunched up in an armchair in one of Steve’s hoodies -- too big by far -- with his hair hanging around his face and a pair of sweatpants he’s stolen from Wilson just to piss him off. He looks unapproachable and unwelcoming, and that’s just about how he likes it. 

Not that he wants to be unapproachable to Clint specifically - they’ve got a low key friendship of their own, mostly revolving around shooting contests and Mario Kart and coffee - but Steve being on a mission without Bucky to watch his six always puts Bucky’s back up, and he’s not exactly got what his Ma would’ve called company manners. So he doesn’t offer Clint anything because he doesn’t feel like he’s got much to offer at the moment. 

Not that it seems to put Clint off at all, but then again, nothing Bucky’s ever done seemed to do that. Even when he was at his most bristly, with his paranoid, fresh-off-the-run attitude, Clint had still been ballsy enough to tell Bucky to ‘move your ass, I can’t get to the coffee’. 

It’s one of the things Bucky usually appreciates about him.

Usually. 

“You’ll do,” Clint announces, as though Bucky’s volunteered for something.

“Excuse me?”

Bucky isn’t sure he appreciates it today.

“C’mon, I need a hand, and no one else’s around.” Clint turns to go, leaving Bucky staring after him.

Bucky considers staying just where he is: ensconced comfortably in his favorite armchair with a book he hasn’t retained a word of, and ignoring Clint entirely. Unfortunately, the book _isn’t_ holding his attention, and Clint’s piqued his curiosity, and he’s just about decided that _anything_ has got to be better than sitting here, going out of his mind wondering what Steve’s doing at the moment. 

The answer, he knows, is probably something that would piss Bucky off.

With a sigh, Bucky sets the book aside and follows Clint out of the room. The guy clearly hasn’t bothered to even wonder if Bucky will follow, because he’s already at the elevator bank waiting on the doors to open. 

“So what’m I doing?” Bucky asks into the silence, since Clint doesn’t seem too keen on volunteering the information.

“Oh.” Clint looks at him over his shoulder with a grin. “My tripod broke, you’ve got a pretty steady grip, I just need you to hold a camera for like… ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.”

“You want me to hold a camera?” Bucky asks flatly. “What for?”

“My blog,” Clint says, just as the elevator arrives. “I’ve tried to set it up on the table but the angle’s all wrong. I’m just doing Q&A today, so it’s nothing crazy. C’mon, you’d be helping me out and it’ll get your mind off Steve.”

Bucky bristles at the idea that he’s so transparent that even Clint can tell he’s rattled - it’s not exactly like they’re the best of friends. But he also can’t think of any way to get out of the task now that he’s got up off of his chair and followed Clint to the elevator, so he goes ahead and follows him into the elevator too, lets it take them to the second highest floor in the Tower, where Clint and Natalia share a floor between them. 

The elevator deposits them into a long hallway that’s identical to the set up Bucky shares with Steve, with doors to two apartments, one on either side. Clint leads them to the north-facing apartment, the same side that Bucky has on his own floor. It gets the least sun, and Bucky figures that Clint’s chosen it for the same reasons Bucky has - namely his erratic sleeping habits, nightmares, and a desire to be able to easily sleep whenever he’s able, without the sun pouring in on his face at the worst times. They’ve run into each other enough times in the middle of the night, watched enough infomercials side by side for Bucky to know that it’s a trait they share. 

Unlike Bucky’s place, Clint’s apartment is a bit of a disaster with arrows and fletching and bits of nonsense everywhere, and they go down the hall to a small room in the back, one that Bucky has left empty but which Clint has set up for… something. 

There’s a table in the corner, dark wood, with a black zippered basket tucked underneath it, a wide mirror on the wall with lights that remind Bucky of movie stars and makeup chairs, and in front of it is a brown leather computer chair that looks comfortable and well-worn. In front of that are the remains of a tripod that had clearly been held together with duct-tape and prayers.

Clint collapses into the chair with a huff. “Kay, so all I need you to do is hold the camera steady while I answer fanmail, and I’ll buy you a beer or something. Shouldn’t take long. I just can’t figure out a good way to prop the camera up.”

Seeing as there’s only one other small table in the room, and it’s not even remotely the right height, Bucky can at least understand why Clint hasn’t been able to get the angle right, but --

“Fanmail?” he asks, bewildered.

Hawkeye gets fanmail?

Okay, that’s unfair. _Steve_ gets fanmail. It stands to reason the other Avengers do, too. It’s just never occurred to Bucky that someone might answer them with a video.

“Yeah, it’s Wank-off Wednesday and I always answer fanmail. It’s like a break from everything else, I guess.” Clint shrugs, scratching at the back of his head. “If you wanna grab a bar stool or something out of the kitchen to sit on you can, I didn’t think of that, sorry.”

Bucky stops asking questions. He’s fairly sure he doesn’t _want_ to know why Clint calls it Wank-off Wednesday. He just wants to get this over with. He hauls a stool from the kitchen bar back into the little room, and Clint hands him the camera without preamble. He’s moved the small table next to his chair and he’s got a stack of notecards, a bottle of water, and a sad-looking flag.

“You know how to use that, right?” Clint checks, nodding at the camera. 

Bucky rolls his eyes, making a production out of flicking the power button on and playing with the zoom and focus buttons. “Pretty sure I can figure it out.” He mostly manages to keep the sarcasm out of his tone.

“Alright, I’m just checking,” Clint says. “I didn’t know how to use it when I bought it.”

And - okay, that’s fair. Bucky’s only taken offense to it because Tony always assumes he and Steve can’t operate a doorknob without his careful guidance. 

Clint clears his throat, takes a sip of the water, and squares his shoulders. “Ready when you are,” he says, and Bucky lifts the camera with his left arm, getting it focused, and settles the metal plates of the arm to hold position. So long as he doesn’t fall off the stool, the camera shouldn’t move an inch. He hits ‘record’.

“Okay guys, welcome to Wank-off Wednesday,” Clint says, all smooth and cheerful and more personable than Bucky thinks he’s ever heard the guy be. “I got a lot of letters this week, so I had to pull the juiciest ones out to read for you, and I’ll post the rest -- with responses -- on the website. Okay, here we go!”

He reaches for the stack of note cards and flips the first one, holding it up like he’s reading it, but speaking directly into the camera.

“From GrrlTragic: Suddenly all the actual sex toys in the world disappear, what do you use in their place?”

Bucky is grateful he’s locked his arm, because otherwise the camera would’ve tumbled straight out of his grip and onto the floor. He’s staring at Clint in shock but Clint doesn’t seem to notice, just laughing and setting the card aside as he continues to talk. 

“A true dystopian nightmare, GrrlTragic. Worse than when the aliens invaded. I’d have to find something that vibrates, like an electric toothbrush, for those hard to reach places. Dildos would be a little easier to come by - ha! - since anything can be covered in a condom. A bumpy vegetable like a cucumber, maybe, until I had to throw it out. Finding butt toys with flared bases would be the worst. Maybe I could find some silicone kitchen tools to use…” Clint trails off, looking thoughtful. “Thanks for writing!”

He picks up the next card, and Bucky manages to pick his jaw up off the ground.

What the actual fuck?

Clint doesn’t seem to notice his shock, just grins as he looks up from the card. “Okay, this next one’s a little personal, and we all know that I like to keep what happens in my bedroom off the channel --” he winks like maybe he and the audience know exactly the opposite, and Bucky -- Bucky needs a drink. Something stiff. Strong. He wonders if Tony ever actually made good on his promise to invent an alcoholic beverage strong enough to trick even his and Steve’s super serum brains into getting a little tipsy.

“But today, I’m willing to make an exception. CaveDweller37, it’s your lucky day. Here we go.” Clint clears his throat, squares his shoulders and reads, in a serious voice, “You fucking asshole, do you have any fucking idea how stupid you are, you worthless piece of shit? I’m a long-time subscriber but I think I’m going to have to unfollow after the shit show of your video rating different butt plugs, in which you revealed, like it was no big deal, that you’re gay. Fuck you. You’re the fucking worst. God hates you and your lifestyle. Fuck you for ruining a perfectly good channel about sex toys with your personal politics. Asshole.”

By the time he’s done reading, Bucky’s grip is too tight -- the camera creaks a little, like its fragile bits and pieces might not hold up all that well to the full force of the Winter Soldier’s rage. It’s fair -- he’s crushed stronger things than cameras in his fist.

He’s ready for Clint to lay into the writer, but instead he looks up at the camera, grins easily, and says, “We’ll miss you, CaveDweller37, and your charming contributions to the comment section. And for clarification, I’m not gay, I’m bi -- you know, like the start of bigot. Speaking of, I think your god probably cares more about the shit you say about women on your blog than he does about the things I stick up my ass. Thanks for writing!” 

Clint flashes a toothy grin and waves the sad little flag around. “Womp-womp flag for you, have a nice life, see you never!”

Then he chuckles like that shit is _normal_ for him and picks up the next card like it’s no big deal. Before he can read it, however, his gaze wanders up to Bucky and he blinks, almost like he forgot Bucky was there at all. Bucky is not used to being overlooked, especially by those who know how fucking dangerous he is. “You okay, man?” he asks, frowning a little. “Shit. _Are_ you okay with this? I shoulda warned you, some of the fans are dicks. Sorry. I’m almost done, I swear.”

Bucky just grits his teeth and forces something close to a smile, because all he’s here for is to hold a camera, not to have - fucking feelings or whatever about how Clint chooses to spend his time. “Fine, Clint. Just hurry up.”

Clint grins gratefully and then focuses on the camera again, turning smooth and personable. “We’ve only got time for one more question,” he says, before clearing his throat. “This one’s from … aw, shit, I forgot I picked this one.” He rolls his eyes. “How many times do I gotta tell you to stop writing in, Wade Wilson? I’m not interested in collaborating on a special about double-sided butt plugs!”

Bucky blinks. Clint flashes a charming grin. “And that’s all we’ve got time for, folks. Don’t forget to subscribe, I put out new content twice a week, and if you’re interested in merch, I’ve put the link on the comments page. Happy Wank-Off Wednesday!”

He waves, a quick wiggle of his fingers, and then hops up, grabbing the camera. “Dude, thanks so much, you’re a lifesaver. I swear, I’ll get a new tripod and we can, uh.” He flashes a quick look, cheeks flushed. “Forget this ever happened. Deal?”

Bucky wants to tell him that he still doesn’t understand what the fuck this was or why it happened. 

“Are you -- is this some sort of endorsement deal?” he asks, because he knows Adidas is always after Steve to pose in their ridiculously tight-fitting shirts.

Clint’s cheeks are a little pink and he says, “Listen. Everyone’s got their thing, okay? Their side hustle. I guess I thought Steve would’ve mentioned it to you.”

Do they?

Does Bucky?

Should he? 

What the fuck is a side hustle?

Clint must see his confusion, because he waves a quick hand as he plugs the camera into a laptop. “Okay, maybe not you, but the American government owes you decades of back pay -- did you still get that? I mean, sure, you were a double agent, but you were also basically a POW, right, so they should. Anyway, you and Steve, you’re set. Tony’s set. Bruce has his peer reviewed science shit. Natasha’s got stock market stuff. Thor is a god. Scott’s got his thing at Baskin Robbins -- is he still doing that? Anyway, what I’m saying is, superheroing isn’t a full time thing. We all know that.”

“So you’re… answering fan mail about sex toys for a little more allowance?”

Clint flashes some finger guns. “Exactly. See? It’s no big deal. I should’ve told you what you were in for, and I’m sorry about that, but if it’s any consolation repression is both easy and free. Thanks for your help. I gotta do a lot of editing if I want to get this up before Wank-Off Wednesday ends. We’ll talk about this another time, or preferably never. Okay?”

He closes his door in Bucky’s face - Bucky hadn’t even realized Clint had been maneuvering him out of his apartment.

What the actual fuck?

*

The next morning, early, JARVIS wakes Bucky with a polite chime and a, “Sergeant Barnes, there is a delivery agent waiting for you in the lobby, should I send him up?”

“Uhh,” Bucky says, rubbing at the sleep in his eyes. “Sure?”

There’s a knock a few minutes later and by then, Bucky’s managed to pull on some sweats and a t-shirt.

The delivery man is holding a truly ostentatious edible arrangement with two helium balloons attached. One says, “Thanks!” and the other says “I’m sorry!” and Bucky doesn’t know what to do so he takes it.

He shoves it on the table and intends to forget all about it, which he manages to do by spending the day in the gym with Steve, who is freshly returned from Assembling and looking to work out some aggression.

They go up to Bucky’s room after and Steve is transparently confused but filled with bright curiosity when he sees the chocolate-dipped fruit bouquet.

“Aw, Buck, what’s this for?”

Bucky doesn’t know where to begin.

*

Bucky manages to hold off on investigating further for three days. 

It's not that he's interested. Why the hell would he be interested? It's more the lack of any kind of diversion when you're confined to a multi-million dollar tower with all kinds of games rooms, at least seven gyms just on the residential floors, a couple of swimming pools and half a dozen libraries - 

Okay, sue him, he's curious. Clint had been so easy in front of the camera, friendly and funny and openly talking about things that Bucky'd always thought ought to stay in the bedroom. Actually, that's not entirely accurate; Bucky never got much of a chance to think about them at all. He knew things like that existed - dilators and dildos and french ticklers and all - but he'd never spent much time in the sort of company that'd talked about things like that, not in anything above a scandalised whisper. There'd been places, and there'd been words, and there'd been ways, but they'd been secret ones; as Bucky understands it just about anyone and their mother can find things on the internet, nowadays, and he has to admire Clint's goddamn balls. 

Not his - 

Not actual - 

Shit. 

The thing is, Bucky would be halfway to thinking he'd imagined the whole thing if it wasn't for the drooping balloons and half-eaten treats that are a looming presence in his rooms. Clint's been just the same as always. He'd practically draped himself over Natalia just as soon as she'd come back, and he hasn't spoken much to Bucky since - but he hasn't shown any particular inclination to avoid him, either. It's like nothing ever happened. 

Except now Bucky's curious. 

He gets out of bed three days after the Tripod Incident. It's a good day, bright sunshine lighting up New York, and he's grateful for the fact that his apartment doesn't get any direct light but he's also pondering taking one of the battered sci-fi paperbacks from the shelves he asked Tony for and curling up somewhere sheltered out on the roof. He hauls on a shirt and a pair of sweatpants that're cut low and have Natalia's hourglass on the ass. 

Out in the communal kitchen there's a note stuck to the fridge - Steve's out running with Sam, and Bucky kind of hates that Steve still feels like he's got to tell him that. There's coffee steaming in the pot, at least, and Bucky fills a mug and shoves a couple slices of bread in the toaster. By the time Clint shows up, scratching his ass and yawning, Bucky's made a decent start on some eggs and has almost finished the coffee, which prompts a scandalised whine from Clint that catches in Bucky's ear. 

"Sit down before you fall down," he says, rolling his eyes and pointing with the spatula, "gimme two minutes and I'll make some more.” Bucky learned early that the person who drinks the last coffee has to start on a refill; apparently Bruce doesn’t take kindly to empty pots. 

Clint moans pathetically and collapses forward against the table, and then sucks in a breath and shifts his weight. Bucky eyes him cautiously and notes the faint flush on Clint's cheeks. 

"You okay?" he asks, and Clint only moves enough to stick one of his thumbs up.

"Fucking Friday," he mumbles, almost under his breath. Bucky figures the guy's got a hangover, loads up a plate for him with toast and eggs and sets a new pot going. It's when he's fetching a mug from the cupboard that he remembers Wank-off Wednesdays and Clint's apparent love of alliteration. He hisses out a curse as the mug slips out of his fingers, and a poorly-judged grab for it has ceramic crushing against metal. 

"Shit," Clint says, shoving himself to his feet, "you good?" He darts over to the tall, thin cupboard next to the pantry and pulls out a dustpan and broom, hovering a little anxiously until Bucky snatches them out of his hands and growls for him to go eat his damned breakfast. That way he's occupied sweeping up shards and can't check out whether Clint's walk is as bow-legged as Bucky'd thought he'd seen. 

He’s so caught up in deliberately not watching Clint, in not thinking about what might make him walk that way, that the gentle ding of the elevator almost has him jumping out of his goddamned skin. 

"...saying it's kinda crass to crow about winning when you're unnaturally gifted, is all." Sam's sweated through his shirt and he's walking a little unsteadily, 'cos as rational as the guy tries to be he's always gotta compete. He’s carrying a package under his arm which Steve keeps trying to carry for him, even while he’s herding Sam into the kitchen like a sheepdog. It'd be sweet if it weren't for his shit-eating grin. 

"If you can't take the heat," Steve says, and Sam snorts. 

"Clint, back me up here." 

"You're expecting Clint - the guy who makes himself poorly designed certificates on the computer when he wins at Mario Kart - to agree that crowing is crass?" Steve shakes his head, grinning. 

Bucky occupies himself tipping the shards into the garbage can and getting a fresh mug out for Clint, but allows himself a smirk at Sam. 

"Ugh," Sam says, "you are all the worst," and he tosses the package he's been holding under his arm over to Clint. "See if I do you any more favours." 

Steve grabs a Gatorade from the fridge and takes a swig before grabbing another and handing it to Sam. 

"You makin' eggs, Buck?" he asks, all innocence, and Bucky mutters something uncomplimentary under his breath as he reaches for the carton. He registers it, though, when Clint hisses between his teeth, when he awkwardly grabs for the package he's opened and tucks the cardboard carefully back around it before pushing up to his feet and making for the door. 

"Coffee, Clint," Bucky says, and Clint waves a hand, tells him he's good and nearly walks into the wall. 

It's suspicious. It's curious. Fuck it, it's goddamn _intriguing_, and Bucky’s so busy wondering about it that he almost burns the damned eggs. 

*

Nothing can really hold Bucky’s attention. He's shifty and restless, finds himself wandering aimlessly around the roof when he can't lose himself in stories of other worlds. It’s simpler to concentrate on fantastical voyages and alien worlds when half his mind isn’t on the way Clint had been so easy talking about things that’d make even a dockworker blush. 

There’s a fierce curiosity there, too, but it’s tempered with wariness - he’s on fire to know about the weird and wonderful things people’ve learned to get off with, in this age of talking computers and biddable robots and the apparently endless possibilities of vinyl. It’s just that if that curiosity is gonna be satisfied by _Clint -_

They’ve built a fragile sort of friendship. A little more stable than Bucky’d thought, if Clint’s willing to talk about shoving vegetables up his ass in front of him, sure, but he’s wary that watching the videos is gonna change something fundamental. 

If he could only get the ideas out of his head. 

He finds himself in front of the laptop computer Tony'd given him three or four times through the day, almost breaking the hinges when he closes it with a slam. The fifth time, it's when the evening is closing in around him, making his apartment feel a little smaller, more manageable, kinda safe. Mindful of all the nosy assholes who can't keep their feet on the ground, Bucky closes the blinds in his bedroom and sprawls on his mattress, propping his back up with pillows and finally giving in. 

_Clint Barton videos_ is what he tries first, and honestly almost gets distracted by the sheer number of hits that involve the word 'fail'. He goes for _Hawkeye_ next, which brings up the startling revelation that Clint does a hell of a lot of volunteering in his free time. 

Bucky chooses not to examine the feelings that tiny kids in hospital gowns holding tiny bows give him. 

Finally, giving in, he braces himself and types in 'Wank-Off Wednesdays', having to work fast to close out of the goddamn pop-ups that plaster his screen. It takes a moment of scanning some pretty terrifying screencaps before he catches the angle of a familiar jaw, although whatever he's found it's sure as hell not the video he'd helped film. He'd remember if he'd seen that expression before. 

He taps his finger lightly on the trackpad, cursor hovering just over Clint's slightly open mouth. 

"What the fuck am I doing?" he mutters to himself, and pushes the screen of his laptop closed, shoving himself off the bed and heading for the door. 

The tower is quiet, 'cos apparently everyone else had found better things to do with their free time. Bucky throws himself onto the couch and grabs the remote control, scrolling mindlessly through channels until he finds something suitably loud and violent and completely distracting, and he gets caught up enough in it that he almost doesn't notice Clint wandering through to the kitchen. Almost. There's the gentle hum of the microwave interspersed with the sounds of popping corn, and then Clint settles on the couch next to him, placing a warm bowl between them and grabbing the remote so he can flick on the closed captioning. 

It's fine. It's normal. There’ve been a handful of other nights like this in the tower, and Bucky has learned that every one of the Avengers has nightmares, that none of them are going to judge. He relaxes back into the softness of the couch, relieved, as the idiotic plot unspools on the screen. He doesn't even cast a sideways glance, not even once, at the angle of Clint's jaw. 

*

_Hey, you’re good at knots, yeah?_

Bucky stares at the text some more.

He’s been staring at the text in a general state of confusion for at least ten minutes. It’s Monday and, for the life of him, Bucky can’t forget that Wednesdays are Wank-off Wednesdays, but he can’t figure out what tying knots could have to do with any of it. 

Maybe he should have paid more attention to Clint’s videos, rather than freaking out and all but throwing his laptop out of the window. The thing’s still hidden under his bed.

Goddamnit, he’s gonna have to watch a few, because he obviously doesn’t know what he’s got himself into here. 

And he still doesn’t know how to reply to Clint’s text.

He’s typed out re-worded versions of the same answer at least three times, and every one of them sounds… suggestive. 

_‘To tie people up, yeah.’_

_‘As restraints, I guess.’_

_‘Only in the context of prisoners, not boats.’_

None of it sounds right, and all of it sounds like an offer, no matter how Bucky tries to make it… less. 

And he can’t figure out _why_ it sounds so suggestive, or if it’s only in his own head, with the knowledge that Clint sometimes does videos on… sex stuff. 

Fuck, what if it’s not even about the videos or the sex stuff, what if Clint just wants some help with something unrelated? Avengers’ business? Then again, Natalia is probably good at knots too, why hadn’t he asked her?

Bucky is overthinking this.

_Sure, I guess,_ is what he finally settles on, and sends it off before he can think much more about it. 

It’s early - Sam and Steve had woken him with their usual barb-filled banter on their way out the door this morning, and Bucky is already grumpy about it - so he’s not expecting any kind of a response anytime soon. Bucky’s not a morning person, but Clint can only be considered not an _awake_ person. If Bucky had anything resembling control over his sleep patterns, he’d sleep until the morning sun is high in the sky and then have breakfast and a cup of coffee before he had to speak to anyone; Clint is living the dream, rarely seen before early afternoon, and he’s a zombie until he’s had half a pot. 

So Bucky has probably got hours to kill while Steve runs Sam into the ground at the park before there’s even the remote possibility that Clint will text him back with any more information. With a pained sigh, Bucky pours himself a cup from the pot of coffee that Steve had oh-so-helpfully turned on when he left, and takes it back to his bedroom to dig out his laptop.

He’s going to have to research.

For science.

Or at least, that’s what he tells himself, as he googles ‘Wank-off Wednesday’ and braces himself for impact. 

See, last time he’d walked in unawares. If he’s going to do this again - if he’s going to capitalise on the first time someone other than Steve has shown him a measure of trust - he’s going to need to know what the hell he’s letting himself in for. 

It’s easy to navigate his way to the video that he found the other day, the first one he’d recognized Clint’s jaw in, and after a moment’s hesitation he clicks the link for the website - _Cupid’s Toy Box_ \- so he can try to find the specific video he’d helped film, since he knows it’s a safe place to start.

He finds it easily enough. It’s the second video under ‘most recent’, entitled ‘Wank-off Wednesday: Saying Goodbye to a Fan’. Bucky snorts. He deliberately ignores the video above it, which is called ‘Frisky Friday - Review: G-Rider’. He’s pretty sure he’s not ready for that. 

Bucky clicks the Wednesday video, because curiosity has got him this far, and he’s been tortured by Hydra, goddammit, he can do this. Also, he filmed it, so there shouldn’t be any surprises.

There aren’t. It’s exactly what Bucky filmed - minus the segue where Clint had checked in on him - plus what is obviously a pre-recorded voiceover that reminds viewers where they can find Clint’s other videos, along with promotional links and a link to a full transcript of the video, for the hearing impaired. The video also has toggle-on closed captioning. All of which is… nice. Thoughtful. Then again, Clint is deaf, so Bucky can’t really say he’s surprised. 

On camera, Clint appears even more personable and jovial than he had when Bucky filmed it. Perhaps because of the editing, or the way he’s lightened the video up, or maybe just because the awkwardness of being behind the camera is a couple of degrees of separation away by virtue of Bucky being in his own bedroom on his own laptop.

Bucky is - reluctantly - impressed. 

He navigates back to the video selection screen and is momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options. There are navigation links though, and he finally settles on one that informs him Clint’s videos can be sorted by ‘Most Popular’. He clicks it.

Oh god, then he can further sort by ‘Vibrators’, ‘Dildos’, ‘Anal’, and ‘Everything Else’.

Jesus fucking Christ, this was a mistake. 

But he’s already here, and now he’s over the first flush of nerves he is legitimately curious. 

He clicks ‘Everything Else’. He is… not ready for the other stuff. He’s not sure he’s ready for ‘Everything Else’ but that seems like the safest option. 

The first video that comes up is _Lube! It’s the best!_

Which, okay, that’s probably true. Lube is probably important. Bucky can’t really say for sure - can’t really _remember_ a lot of sexual encounters in his past life, but he’s got enough recollection that he knows hot and wet are pretty important requirements, and he supposes if you’re going to be… sticking things in places, you might want them to be slippery. Right? Right. 

He clicks the link.

Clint’s face shows up on the screen, smiling and crinkling and fucking goddamn _twinkling_ at the goddamn screen. He opens with an introduction about why lube is important, whether you have a vagina or not, and regardless of whether you’re working with a partner. Then he launches into a description of about forty different variations of lube, why each one might be good or bad depending on your specific needs, and hits the highlights on what you can use for lube in a pinch and what you should never, ever, _ever_ put in your body as a substitute for lube.

_Tree sap_ is on the goddamn list of nevers, and Bucky has a disconcerting moment of _what the actual fuck_ in amongst all the growing confusion. Fucking Christ, who knew there was so much to know about lube, for fuck’s sake. Clint talks about textures. He talks about viscosity. He talks about _taste_. 

He mentions an _automatic lube dispenser_. 

Bucky is in way, way over his head. The video on _lube_ is fifteen fucking minutes long. 

So, of course, that’s the moment his phone chimes a message at him. 

_Cool_ the text says, from Clint, because the universe is making a joke of Bucky’s entire existence, _you busy later?_

Bucky heaves a sigh that feels dragged from his bones. It’s not like Clint doesn’t know that Bucky isn’t busy later - Bucky is never busy. Bucky just drifts around the tower like a ghost, it feels like, trying to keep himself occupied. 

_Got nothing planned_.

_Great. Come over whenever._

Which is how, a couple of hours later, Bucky finds himself in Clint’s apartment, being handed a coil of deep violet rope by a shirtless Clint. Who, Bucky notices, is no longer sporting the soft cast he’d been wearing the week before. 

“What the fuck?” Bucky says, following him into the back room again. 

“Well,” Clint starts, flicking his gaze to Bucky and then back to the blank walls of the room. “I can get out of pretty much anything, but I can’t exactly tie my own arms behind my back.”

Bucky blinks at him. “You… want me to tie your hands behind your back?”

Clint clears his throat. “Kinda?” He spins a laptop around, so that Bucky can see the screen. There’s a video, paused about halfway through, where a man is being tied up by another man with a similar-looking style of crimson rope. “I got sent some rope for review, but, uh, seems kinda disingenuous to just tie my own wrists up and call it a day, y’know?”

Bucky doesn’t know. For now, he’s fine with that. The video is only five minutes long and he _is_ good at tying people up to prevent their escape, and hell, maybe this can carry over to his - eventually - Avenging things. They’re gonna want him to capture bad guys, not kill them, probably.

He watches the video. It seems simple enough and, honestly, pretty effective at preventing escape. The ropes wind from shoulders to wrists, keeping the elbows locked, which means people like Clint can’t jump their wrists to get their hands in front of them, or even bend their arms at all. Bucky decides the knowledge is worth the possible embarrassment. 

“Alright,” he says, “Turn around.”

“Really?” Clint stares at him in disbelief, and Bucky cocks an eyebrow. 

“I ain’t got all day, Clint.”

In the end, Clint is tied up in a series of loops around his biceps and forearms, and intricate knots down his spine, the purple of the rope stark against his skin and Bucky has a confusing moment of… something… that he has to shake off. “How’s that?” he asks.

Clint flexes against the ropes and makes some kind of noise that Bucky can’t interpret at all, but makes his face flush in what feels like the cousin of embarrassment. 

“Huh,” Clint says, thoughtfully. “Nice job.”

“See you later,” Bucky says, turning to saunter out of the room.

“Hey! No wait-”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you can get outta that by yourself,” Bucky tells him without looking back.

There’s a pause and then, “Yeah, alright, fine, but I need you to take a picture before you go.”

Dammit. That had been a great exit, too. 

Bucky spins back around, aggrieved, but he takes his time with the photo, making sure he gets the even line of knots and the way Clint’s muscles stand out in relief against the ropes. 

He doesn’t make it to the front door of the apartment before the balled-up rope hits him between his shoulders.

“Fifty bucks!” Clint crows, from where he’s leaning against the wall in the hallway, smirking. 

Goddamn circus brats.

*

Bucky orders lube.

Not just any lube -- Clint’s favourite lube. He figures he might as well trust the word of an expert, and it certainly appears as if Clint’s something of an expert when it comes to lube. And. Nipple clamps. Vibrators. Butt plugs. And various other things that Bucky’s pretty sure he is not yet ready to know about.

JARVIS is a pal and ensures the lube is delivered by a nervous looking delivery guy, in discreet packaging, and doesn’t go through the regular mail room.

And. Well. It’s already late afternoon and Bucky hasn’t got anything on his schedule, so.

He cracks it open.

*

Bucky feels great. Bucky feels fucking amazing. There are muscles in his body that are relaxed in ways they have never been before -- and a few that feel just a little stiff this morning, but in a way that makes him want to yawn and stretch and poke at the faint soreness because there are spectacular memories associated with it.

Clint knows his lube.

Fuck. It almost makes Bucky wanna know if Clint is as much an expert on all the other things he’s got videos about.

Bucky’s mussed and sleepy and satisfied, fresh out of the shower, when he makes his way to the common kitchen, relaxed in a way he hasn’t been in a long time -- certainly not around Steve or his Avenger buddies.

All he needs is coffee and maybe a poptart, so it takes him a moment or two to realize that Tony, who had been mid-manic monologue when he’d walked in, has slowly stopped speaking and is now staring, eyebrows going progressively higher on his forehead.

Bucky cocks his head, tries for a challenging glare, and feels his expression top out at a lazily inquisitive sort of smirk.

He’ll have to work on it. Apparently jerking off all night with Clint’s lube isn’t good for his ability to intimidate.

“Problem, Stark?” he asks, pouring himself a mug of coffee.

Steve and Sam are out running, Clint has poured himself into a chair at the table and is downing coffee like his life depends on it, and Bruce looks half asleep and sick to death of Tony’s babbling.

Tony says, “Jesus, Barnes, you get laid or something?”

Clint starts choking on his coffee and Bruce rushes over to administer first aid or something. Bucky just takes a long, slow sip of his coffee, leaning one hip against the counter and studying Tony over the rim.

He scratches idly at his hip bone with his free hand and tugs his sweats up a bit and, huh. He forgot a shirt.

Bucky’s never exactly been shy and he doesn’t give a fuck if people stare at his scars or the broken place where his metal arm is grafted to his body, but he’s also not used to being so unaware of himself, his body and his surroundings.

Fuck, lube really does make all the difference.

He wants to raise his coffee mug in a silent salute to Clint, who has finally gotten his breathing under control and is now clinging to the edge of the table and gasping and staring at Bucky like he’s never seen a bare chest before. Bucky resists the urge, though, because if he thanks Clint, people will want to know why, and that’s a conversation Bucky doesn’t want to have.

So he stretches his arm up over his head, absently rubbing at the back of his neck and arching his back and says, “You’re staring, Stark. It’s rude.”

And then wanders out of the kitchen with his mug.

He wonders if he should go down to the gym and get a workout in, and then wonders if the range might be better. He thinks about grabbing a book and going up to the roof.

And then he gives up pretending and goes back to his room, grabbing the bottle of lube and settling into bed. He’d used his laptop the night before, a free porn site JARVIS had recommended and promised not to tell anyone he’d ever viewed, but his laptop is closed and Bucky is feeling lazy so instead he shifts lower on the bed, pulls his knees up, and slips his slicked up hand down the front of his loose sweats.

He palms his dick, half hard, and exhales, his imagination flickering over images from the videos he’d watched the night before.

It really is spectacular lube. It feels like silk. It feels like --

He wonders what it would feel like on his metal hand, what that would feel like on his dick, and a soft hum catches in the back of his throat.

He slicks up that hand and shoves his pants down around his thighs and wraps his hand around his cock, which is hard and aching now, just from thinking about what this would feel like.

His hand is cool, grip just a little tighter than he thought he’d like, but now it’s perfect.

He arches up into his grip and wonders what Clint would say if he knew -- how Clint’s review of this particular lube might change if he knew it worked even on a hand made up of metal plates.

“Shit,” Bucky hisses, biting down hard on his bottom lip, hand moving faster. 

He wonders what Clint would think of all of this, if he could see -- if he was watching -- if he was _filming_ \--

He comes all over his metal hand with a ragged gasp, trembling for a moment before falling back onto his pillows and breathing heavily, eyes wide and blinking slowly.

He’s sweaty and his hand is sticky with lube and come and he’s feeling vaguely unsettled, confused about why the idea of Clint with a camera would be the one that got him off.

When had he developed a thing for cameras?

It’s not something he wants to think about.

*

The only times he leaves his room, that day, is to make quick trips to the bathroom; mostly his time is spent in exploration, and imagination, and the kind of gentle workout that Sam always recommends yoga for. 

Frankly, fuck yoga, 'cos there's no way it has anything on this. 

At one point, he even - the videos made him curious, see. Not the videos he was watching last night, the ones with the unimaginative soundtrack and the unsmudged makeup and the perfect dicks. He's curious about the list of videos he _hadn't_ watched, the ones Clint had filmed, all the titles and labels and toys that he didn't know. And the ones he did, but isn't sure he understands. 

At one point, he even bites his lip, and - and reaches a little further. Discovers his perineum, and what happens when he presses... just... right. 

(Lets his hand drift a little more, but ends up flinching away from the vulnerability of it, his breath hissing through his teeth.)

Rather than deal with the Avengers en masse while he's worn thin and a little vulnerable, he relies on the plastic crate under the bed, the one Steve put together for him when he was having a tough time accepting that he was welcome outside of his rooms. There's shelf stable foods, cartons of juice, a couple of bright blue drinks that Bucky regards with more than a little suspicion. 

_missed u @ dinner_, Clint sends him, sometime late in the evening when the shadows are curling into the corners of Bucky’s room. _u tied up?_

He'd've maybe gone a little red at that if it wasn't so clear that Clint had done it for him, scrambling pink-tinted texts trying incoherently to take it back, _asd;askldj;lkasj_ and _I didn’t mean - _and _please just ignore -_ almost as good as seeing the embarrassment on his face. 

_50 bucks if you can get your foot outta your mouth_, Bucky sends, and spends most of the rest of the evening reading something interesting in shades of '60s sci-fi and smirking a little at every ping of his phone. He means to get back to Clint but gets all caught up in the story, almost all of the way to the end of the book when he drifts off to sleep. 

A day like the one he has ought to lead to a gentle night's sleep, worn out and gently aching, dreaming on the raft of ideas that the videos have left behind. Instead Bucky's sitting upright at half past two in the morning, wide-eyed and breathing hard and chewing punishingly on his lip. 

He doesn't - quite - remember what he was dreaming. There are flashes, residuals of just enough that he knows he doesn't want to know. The room is too big and too quiet, and he feels adrift on the emptiness of his bed, so he stretches over the side of his mattress and grabs his laptop, pulling it onto his lap and flexing shaking fingers with no idea what he's gonna type. 

He's saved from any kind of decision-making by the fact that his screen warms into life to show him that he's still got Clint's website open. It's immediately almost impossible to think of anything better than the wry amusement in Clint's voice when he was schooling that asshole as a way to fill the unending goddamn space between the four blank walls. 

Q&As is an easy category to pick from the array filed under 'Wank-Off Wednesdays', and none of the pictures look too alarming, except for maybe the one with the zucchini. Bucky's finger hovers over the touchpad indecisively for a moment or two, and then he picks a video and clicks. 

Clint looks kind of tired when the video starts up, and he's got a couple of butterfly stitches holding his chin together, but that does nothing to diminish the brightness of his smile. He's wearing black, which looks somehow wrong on him, and Bucky absently notes that he oughta tell the guy that in the darkness of the room he films in, that colour washes him right out. 

"Well you guys're killing me," he says, with no introduction, like they're already halfway through a conversation. It's the way Clint always talks to Nat, the way Bucky halfway wishes Clint would talk to him too, and it's easy to half-close his eyes, adjust the volume just right, and pretend they're sitting together on the couch in the evening, plotting ways they're going to take over the world. "I swear I mention spanking _one goddamn time_ -"

He shakes his head, makes a poor fucking effort at hiding his smile, and moves straight on to answering someone's question, leaving Bucky with some emotional whiplash and a bunch of bubbling questions that he doesn't even know how to ask. 

"...tried glass," he's saying, when Bucky snaps back to it. "You may not believe this, @wannarawSwampThing - which, as an aside, you do you but you are _gonna_ get a UTI - you may not believe this of my clearly acrobatic and graceful self. You may protest in disbelief. But I am, in real life, all kinds of clumsy, and there is no way I can be trusted with anything breakable near my tender bits. So if I'm going temperature differential I'm gonna go with metal, I guess?" Clint ponders that for a second. He bites his lip - a clearly unconscious movement - and there's the bare suggestion of tongue. "Yeah," he says, then clears his throat and tries again. "Yeah, I figure I'd go metal." 

He snaps himself out of the faraway look after a second, grins and looks back at the index cards he's got in his hand. He squints to read the next question, snorts out an unattractive laugh, and just points at the screen. 

"Wade," he says. "No." It's firm and uncompromising and promises retribution if it's disobeyed; the wink he drops afterwards is just filthy. "And yeah," he says, "I know you enjoyed that." 

Bucky gets through three videos of Clint's low, amused, inexplicably soothing voice before he finally slips off back to sleep, his mind full of a million questions that have driven the nightmares away. 

*

He slouches out of his room the next morning - barely morning, even, 'cos he'd woken up to a dry mouth, to Clint murmuring something goddamn _filthy_ from his laptop, and the realisation that he's slept far later than he normally would. He goes straight to the kitchen, hoping against hope that Clint hasn't been through, that there might be some hope of caffeine still left. Tony's fiddling with something at the counter, possibly 'cos Steve's broken the toaster again, and he looks up and smirks at the pillow-creased confusion that is Bucky's face. 

"Aww," he says, "young love, over so soon. What's up, Buckaroo, did she get a puncture? If you’re needing better recommendations, I’m sure Legolas could point you in the right direction." 

Bucky doesn't bother responding except with one shining, metal finger, and he scrounges in the cupboards until he settles on the biggest mug he can find. After a couple sips from it, though, he puts a fresh pot on to brew. If there’s coffee left in the kitchen, there’s no way Clint’s up, and he figures he maybe owes Clint something, after the halfway decent sleep he's had. 

He considers showering, maybe getting dressed, but instead he slopes off, barefoot, to the elevator and down to the range, locking the door behind him and then curling up on a pile of kevlar, taking half-hearted pot-shots at the holographic targets without putting down his mug. He's fairly sure Steve would be livid if he knew. 

Honestly, that's half the point. 

The lights dim and flash for a moment, and Bucky puts down his mug and carefully unloads his gun before allowing JARVIS to unlock the door. It isn’t exactly a surprise that it's Clint who slinks in - if one of them isn't in the range the other one is, and more recently, increasingly, it's both. He's a little unsettled by how sheepish the guy looks, though, and it's a moment before he remembers all the unanswered text messages that are cluttering up his phone. 

"Look -" Clint says, awkwardly palming the back of his neck, and Bucky decides that he hasn't had enough caffeine for anything that involves that level of embarrassment. 

"Spitballs," he says, which has the result of Clint staring wide-eyed at him like he's some sort of crazy, at least. 

"...what?" 

“Bet I’m a better shot with you with spitballs.” It’s a casual competition they’ve got going, on and off again, whenever they happen to be in the range at the same time, but it’s the first time Bucky’s been the one to suggest the weapon. 

"Spitballs," Clint says, and his mouth is curving up at one edge into something that resembles a smile. 

They emerge from the range a couple of hours later, and the both of them need showers before they're fit to appear anywhere public, but there’s an ease back between them again. Bucky scrolls through the long list of texts once Clint is occupied in conversation with Bruce, the two of them chopping peppers and laughing about some show they both watch. 

_I'm sorry if I fucked everything up,_ the last one says, short and kind of plaintive, and Bucky feels a little bad that he didn’t reply. The spitballs thing seems to have eased them into a better place, though, and Bucky’s absolute resistance to acting as though anything is wrong has basically railroaded Clint into behaving exactly the same way. There were a couple of days of strain, a few tentative back and forths in the dining room and in the range, and then things seem to settle back into how they were before.

Except Clint doesn’t ask for Bucky’s help again and Bucky -

Bucky isn’t sure how he feels about that.

Granted, he’s only helped the guy out a couple of times, but still. He’d been - kind of enjoying it. 

He’d definitely been enjoying Clint’s videos, he’s made his way nearly through the whole Wank-Off Wednesday section and he’s stopped having to google half the words he hears. He’s also learned a hell of a lot about what people get up to in the bedroom these days, though he’s not too sure Clint’s viewers are what you’d call a representative sample. 

Bucky can’t decide if he should offer his help, or wait for Clint to ask, and in the meantime he’s got the rest of Clint’s website to look at. 

Bucky chews on his lip, contemplating the ‘Most Popular’ category of Frisky Friday. 

He’s not sure where to start, mostly because he doesn’t know what half this shit is. 

Partly, though, he’s not sure he wants to invade Clint’s privacy. Sure, they’re out there for public consumption, but they’re for public consumption by strangers and Bucky has no idea if the team has watched them, or even if the team _knows_, though Clint had implied that they do, and Tony’s little offhand comments seem to suggest he at least is aware. 

He’s been staring at Clint’s website for what feels like hours, debating the merits of what he’s thinking about doing. It’s late, and Bucky could just go to bed. 

He _could_, but he’s genuinely curious.

He’s got half-formed memories of a life before war, of a life before Steve was Captain America, but not many of them include much of _this_, if there had even _been_ stuff like this - he’s sure there was something, but it wasn’t anything he’d known about. He can barely remember kissing dames, and not much else.

People have told him he was a bit of a ladies’ man - the history books say the same - but Bucky doesn’t _know_. 

He doesn’t _remember_.

And it’d be nice, he thinks, if he could get a little bit of himself back. At least learn what he likes, before he tries to date. He’s not even sure he _wants_ to date, truth be told, but Steve is making noises about it and Natasha has mentioned how so-and-so from cyber security is nice, and Bucky-

Well hell, he likes getting off, and while he’s not sure he’s ready to do it with another person,it might be nice to figure out few new ways to do it with himself. 

And he _trusts_ Clint, even if that seems stupid in this context. The team trusts him, Steve trusts him, and everything Bucky’s learned from him so far hasn’t been wrong, so…

Bucky looks at the list. The first three reviews are for… things that penetrate. With names like G-rider, Boosty, and Truskin, and Bucky is in no way ready for that. He’s trying real hard not to think about Clint using them. Instead he clicks on the first thing on the list that’s not meant for the butt, and hits play. 

_Frisky Friday - Review: Flight_

That seems safe enough.

Bucky spends the first three minutes of the video confused as fuck because he has no idea what the thing in Clint’s hand is. It looks a lot like the travel mug Steve puts coffee in, except the top is different. And Clint calls it a fleshlight at least twice before Bucky cottons on to the fact that he’s not saying _flash_light, and then he has to pause the video to Google.

And then he has to decide whether he really wants to watch the whole thing.

But since Clint’s not planning to demonstrate its use - or at least, Bucky doesn’t think he is, since he’s fully clothed and sitting on a barstool - Bucky goes ahead and hits play again. He doesn’t bother to rewind - the beginning had only been an introduction and the name of the toy, anyway.

“Okay guys,” Clint says, with a smile on his face, and only one butterfly bandage above his eyebrow. Bucky can see the edges of a bruise peeking out of his shirt collar - purple this time, instead of the black that Bucky keeps reminding himself to tell Clint doesn’t work for him - and one of his knuckles is bandaged up. Bucky notices, because Clint holds the thing - the _fleshlight_ \- up for the camera to see. Now that he can see it better, the top is a weird, clear-looking smushy area, and now that Bucky knows what it is, that makes a lot more sense. 

“Let me start by saying if your dick is bigger than six inches, you’re not gonna like this thing. Don’t ask me how I know.”

Bucky glances down at his cloth-covered crotch, realizes he has no idea if his dick is bigger than six inches and wonders if he should measure it. He looks at his hand. Tries to figure it out, then gives up. 

“But!” Clint holds up a finger and then reaches out with the fleshlight and points the end at the camera, until it focuses in on the opening to the toy and the… inside of it? Bucky goes a little cross-eyed trying to figure out just what the _fuck_ is happening. The toy retreats from the camera’s view, and Clint tosses it from hand to hand, almost absent with it. 

“If you don’t mind shallow, or you’re an average-sized guy, this isn’t a bad model. It’s smaller than most fleshlights, which means you can put it in your carry on and still have room for shoes! And the inside is good, has a little variation in texture and squeeze. Plus, it doesn’t look like a weird rubber vagina, which you know, I always think is a plus. It also doesn’t look like vampire teeth.” He gives a dramatic shudder, and Bucky, again, wonders what the _fuck_. “It’s clear so you can see if it’s clean, which is nice I guess, but the casing is almost black so that like… sort of defeats the purpose of a clear toy?” Clint scratches his head. “I mean the idea of a clear toy is so’s you can see yourself fucking it, but you definitely can’t do that here.” 

Clint leans over to set the thing on the table next to him, only for it to go tumbling off to the floor with a really obnoxious clatter. Clint winces. “And there’s that - the bottom isn’t flat. Which isn’t a big deal, unless the way you use your fleshlight depends on being able to sit it on a flat surface and fuck it - so that might be a drawback.” He scratches at the back of his neck, a little sheepish, but mostly amused, the twinkle in his eyes familiar to Bucky from other, very different circumstances. 

“Overall, I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5, more if it were, uh, a little larger. It’s not my _favorite_ fleshlight - that title is still unrepentantly held by the original Fleshlight-” at his words, a little link pops up at the bottom of the video, one that Bucky can click and-

Bucky can’t seem to stop himself from clicking it. It opens in a new window, and Bucky goes back to watching the video. 

“-but it’s fine for travel and it feels good. You can still use it with the shoe method, which again, guys, I did not invent, Fleshlight invented that, please stop leaving me comments about it.” He grins, bright and wide and on the verge of laughing at himself, and something in Bucky’s chest flutters a little painfully.

He ignores it.

“Remember, if you click my affiliate links and buy something, I get a cut. There’s no trick there, that’s just how affiliate links work. You don’t pay more for the stuff, okay, guys, I just get a cut for advertising.” Clint leans forward, waves a little at the camera. “See you on Wednesday!” and then his bicep is cutting off the video, and then it cuts out completely. 

Bucky blinks a little, feeling confused.

The Q&A videos relax him, listening to Clint laugh and joke with viewers like how he talks to the team- like how he talks to _Bucky_. The review videos aren’t like that. They’re more like how Clint talks when he’s teaching something. Like the time he’d brought that teenage girl to the range, and walked her through shooting one of his trick arrows. It’s not as _close_. As _personal_.

Bucky looks at the link he’s clicked from the video and without really meaning to, orders the thing, the fleshlight, from the website. It’s one of Clint’s affiliate links, he’ll make some money off Bucky buying it right? He’s just helping out a friend. 

He gets the expedited shipping.

Then he goes back and finds the video review for the thing he’s just ordered, and watches that too. He learns what the shoe method is, and sorta wishes he hadn’t.

The fleshlight, when it arrives, is in discreet packaging, brown cardboard with a return address to an LLC company that looks innocuous enough. Steve, at least, doesn’t seem surprised to see it, only barely seems curious that Bucky’s ordering things online these days.

“It’s easier,” Bucky says, gruffly, taking the package from Steve’s hand. “Less people.”

Steve hums his agreement, making Concerned Eyebrows at Bucky, but lets him take the box and doesn’t ask any more questions. 

*

“You’re right,” Bucky types, careful and slow because he doesn’t want to get called out for typos in the comment section.

He’s already got enough anxiety about this.

“The Fleshlight is…” he pauses, he thinks about his options here, about words he could use and words he should use and the best way to make sure that no one ever, ever figures out that this comment is from him. He can only imagine Steve’s horror if the media finds out that The Winter Soldier has been commenting on Pornhub videos, despite the fact that they aren’t actually all that inherently pornographic. No one else seems to have realized that Hawkeye’s the one producing the videos.

“Lovely,” he decides, because it’s not a word he would ever go with but it still conveys how grateful he is for Clint’s endless wisdom.

He hits send and is about to close up his laptop and go join the others for Friday night team bonding, when his browser makes a little chirp that lets him know that one of the accounts he has subscribed to has posted a new video.

And he only subscribes to one account. So.

He does hesitate for a moment, weighs his options, considers just closing down and going to the lounge to listen to Sam and Steve bicker over whose turn it is to pick the movie.Clint’s newest video could wait until morning.

But the videos are short so he may as well watch it now. He clicks the title before second guessing the decision.

_Frisky Friday - Vibe Challenge_

Bucky thinks about hitting the back button but it’s too late. He’s in. Clint’s on his screen, looking as charming and bright as ever, dressed in a soft, well-worn purple t-shirt with a bullseye on the front and Bucky has no idea how his audience doesn’t know who he is by now.

It’s the same outfit he was wearing at breakfast earlier today, and the thought does something strange to Bucky’s breathing -- makes it a little harder to concentrate.

Clint’s sitting at his table, his hair a little mussed, with a butterfly bandage on one eyebrow, when the video starts, and he’s biting his lip and looking just a little unfocused.

“So here’s the deal, you assholes,” he says, pointing at the camera with a grin, his bottom lip shining from his teeth. “I know what you’re up to, all of you commenting on my shit and telling me to do the vibe challenge, and you’re lucky I love you because I’m gonna do it.”

Vibe challenge?

Bucky should probably Google that.

“But I am not, absolutely not, going to do it while reading _50 Shades of Gray_ because I have some goddamn self respect,” Clint declares, slamming his fists on the table. The movement has a strange effect on him and he blinks a few times, something in his posture shifting. “Aw, shit, you guys. Okay. So. What I’m going to do instead is read and reply to some fanmail, and I know it’s not Wank-Off Wednesday but you’re already getting what you want from me so if there is any bitching in the comments, I’ll be pissed. Got it?”

What -- what are they getting? Bucky really needs to Google the Vibe Challenge. But he’s having trouble every time he goes to pause the video because there’s something different in Clint’s energy this time, a little bit of a desperate edge around his smile, and Bucky can’t quite look away.

Clint grabs a pile of cards, drops them on the table, a little messier than usual, and then turns back to the camera.

Bucky hears the way his breath catches, watches him swallow a little shakily, and Bucky frowns, worrying if Clint’s got some sort of injury that makes moving difficult. Should he check in on him? Tell Natasha? Alert Medical?

And then Clint says, “Before we do this, I should tell you that I’m using my favourite, the Tanus T-Bar, which you’ll remember comes in both, uh, black and purple - mine is purple, obviously. I like it because it’s powerful and the shape of the handle makes it comfortable for all day wear. If you wanna know more about why you should definitely look into this model, click the link and check out my review, and don’t forget, I get a cut of any purchase made from my affiliate links, okay, let’s fucking do this.”

Bucky opens the link in another tab and keeps watching, growing more concerned with the way Clint’s speaking, each word tripping over the one before, like he’s trying to get them all out as quickly as he can.

“Okay,” Clint says, grim and determined. He grabs a card. “_IvyAngle298_ wants to know if I have a boyfriend or a girlfriend or if I’m on Tinder. No. I don’t have time for dating because I’m too busy doing shit like this for you fuckers.”

He keeps talking - reading cards and answering - but it’s different from his other videos. He’s unfocused and Bucky can’t seem to look away from the way his hands keep clenching into fists like he’s in pain, the way his breathing keeps going shaky, the way he keeps making small, startled sounds and swearing under his breath.

If he’s in that much pain, he shouldn’t be filming, he should be in bed with ice packs and someone to bring him painkillers and soup and --

It’s not until Clint’s cheeks are pink and his eyes are a wide and dark, until he’s biting down particularly hard on his lip and then ducking his head, that Bucky realizes that Clint is not in pain.

“Oh,” Clint says, breathy and high then his head falls back, baring his throat. “Oh, oh, fuck, you fuckers,” he says, and Bucky’s staring, wide-eyed even as a distant part of his mind wonders how the fuck he got here and why he’s not pushing the back button.

“_Fuck_,” Clint yelps, and then the camera gets knocked over -- he needs someone to hold his goddamn camera, Bucky thinks faintly. Everything’s blurry for a moment but he can hear Clint’s breathing, ragged and desperate, a bitten off moan, and then the video goes black for half a second.

When it resumes, Clint’s sitting on his stool again, a mess of cards on the table in front of him like he knocked over his stack. He’s flushed and clearly freshly showered, his hair wet and finger-combed off his face, his shirt -- that same damned purple one with the bullseye -- damp and clinging to his shoulders.

“Check out the Tantus T-Bar,” he says, firm but with that flirty edge to it. “And don’t forget to subscribe, you bastards.”

He flashes a grin and a wink and the video ends and Bucky just-

Just sits there. Alone with his thoughts. Wondering when his dick got so hard.

He doesn’t make it to movie night.

*

Breakfast the next morning is awkward in a way it hasn’t been in quite some time. 

Bucky finally drags himself out of his rooms and into the kitchen, knowing that if he doesn’t Steve’ll show up, and the very last thing he wants is for Steve to come into his room and smell exactly what Bucky got up to instead of team bonding the night before.

Bucky feels strange, unsettled in his skin, like it’s a little too tight, like anybody can look at him and see his guilt written all over his face. The guilt is a weird, unwelcome sensation, because Bucky feels vaguely guilty but he’s not quite sure why. Is it because he skipped movie night to jerk off or because he jerked off to vague thoughts of Clint’s half-lidded expression and the flush on his cheeks? At the time it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but in the morning sunshine it leaves Bucky off balance and unsure of himself. 

The only saving grace, he thinks -- as he pours himself an industrial-sized mug of coffee and a poptart and curls up at the table -- is that Clint’s not there yet and Banner, as usual, doesn’t seem inclined to look up from the paper to talk.

Bucky is halfway through his poptart and almost done compartmentalizing his feelings when Clint walks in, half-asleep and half-dressed, his sweats riding precariously low and his hair a fantastic mess above his face. 

Bucky scalds his tongue on his coffee and does his best to hide the startled, pained whine he really wants to make, which is because of the goddamn coffee and not Clint’s stupid, sleepy face or his abs or --

It’s possible Bucky hasn’t compartmentalized the night before at all.

Clint yawns, heading straight for the coffee pot, and Bucky gets as firm a grip as he can on his panic and focuses on his poptart. It’s one of the blue ones with purple swirls and he fucking hates it, but he studies it like it’s got all the mysteries of the world contained in its disgusting icing.

“You alright, Bucky?” Banner asks, and Bucky shoots him a startled look.

“I’m fine, why?” he says, instead of running from the room like he wants to.

“Yeah, Buck, we missed you last night,” Clint says, collapsing into the chair across from him and cradling his mug of coffee, breathing it in. His eyes are dark and sleepy and he’s got pillow lines on his cheek and Bucky knows what he looks like after he comes now. He can’t help but wonder if this is what he’d look like just waking up - he knows that it must be - and it’s too much and too intimate and he’s always been pretty sure he’s straight, except for how he’s not all that sure anymore. 

Bucky had only just been getting his identity back and now it feels like he’s losing it again -- or maybe this is just another piece he had forgotten about. Had Hydra taken this from him? He doesn’t know and it makes him anxious in a way he hasn’t been since -- well, since he started falling asleep listening to Clint talk about sex toys.

Fuck.

He’s not fucking straight at all, is he.

“Hey,” Clint says, sounding more awake now, his eyes narrowed and fixed on Bucky’s face. He looks like he wants to reach out and touch - his hand giving an aborted twitch - but he doesn’t. “Seriously. You okay?”

“We should go shoot something,” Bucky says, desperately. “After breakfast. If you want.”

Clint blinks but doesn’t look opposed to it, smiling a little and saying, “Well, sure. Let me just grab something to eat and we can--”

Bucky slides his half a poptart over and Clint’s smile grows brighter. “Thanks,” he says, like it’s a gift.

And then he crams the entire thing in his mouth and takes a swig of coffee and Bucky is filled with despair because this is the guy his body is gonna decide to be attracted to, after all this time? Really?

“Let’s go,” Clint says, with a spray of poptart crumbs. He hitches his sweats up and grabs his coffee and Bucky just follows helplessly behind.

*

Bucky’s hands feel steadier when he's got a gun in them, which was the kind of thing that he'd learned not to tell his therapist. He starts out shooting bullseyes, 'cos the silhouettes - he's not comfortable, still, with how lethal he can be on instinct. So he starts out shooting bullseyes, and the way Tony's built his range to be adjustable and adaptable allows him to shoot right beside Clint. After a minute or two of regular shooting, after his shoulders have unwound, he notices that Clint is matching him shot for shot, even at the greater distance his longbow allows him. Bucky snorts and clips the edge of his target, curious to see if Clint's ego will allow him to mimic his shot; Clint aims carefully and shoots through the hole Bucky's left, instead. 

Bucky grins sideways at him, and then - fuck it. He puts down his gun and turns a little, folds his arms across his chest like he's throwing down a challenge, and then just - watches. Watches as Clint gets that shine on that he has in fight footage sometimes. Like underneath it all, somehow, he's performing; like underneath it all he's having _fun_. 

It's a different type of eager to the video Bucky'd watched - and he could've done without that comparison, if he's honest - but it's no less captivating. Clint's - Jesus, it feels queer to say it, and he’ll need some time to get used to that, but Clint's beautiful when he's shooting like this, simultaneously focused and relaxed like it's some kinda zen for him. Bucky's eyes skip from the sweat damping his temples, to the fragility of his goddamn goofy ears, to the superhero line of his jaw; he catches the flash of Clint's baby blues almost by accident. It's a moment of eye contact, less than that, but it hits something critical in Bucky's chest. He has no clue what his expression is giving away, but Clint looses the tension on his bow string and lets his arms drop. 

"Wanna say something to me, there, Buck?" Clint asks, and it feels like a heavier question than it oughta be. 

"I wanted to ask - " Bucky bites down on his lip, 'cos that ain't quite honest, is it? "No, I - I mean, if you still need help with those videos of yours, I wanted to. Do that." 

Clint's eyes widen, vulnerable springtime blue, and his smile's like springtime too, startled new and warming. 

"I mean that'd be great," Clint says, "if you're sure, that'd be - _are_ you sure?" 

"Sure I'm sure." Bucky flexes his fingers and folds them into fists, tucked tight into his sides. "Can't have the camera falling over, right?" It doesn't come out as steadily as he means it, and there's a moment before it hits Clint, before he sucks in a sharp breath and looks at Bucky narrowly, who keeps his face as blank as he can make it. 

"Okay," Clint says, slow and thoughtful. "Okay, I - actually, there's something I've been meaning to do but I wasn't actually sure I could manage it by myself. Didn't _want _to do it by myself, really, but it'd -" he bounces on his toes a little, grinning, like there's a lot he's holding in. "I think I'd like it if you were there." 

"Okay," Bucky says, a tiny smile slipping loose before he can stop it. He unloads his gun and racks it, tucking his hair behind his ear and turning at the door, watching for a second the idiot grin on Clint's face as he draws the string back and fires flawlessly. "So I'll come to your room tonight, then?" 

Clint throws a grin over his shoulder, shoots an arrow into the target at the same instant without even looking. It's - fuck, it is a _hell_ of a thing. 

"Looking forward to it," Clint says, and Bucky doesn't respond because he's not sure how to keep it anywhere close to casual if he says that Clint ain't the only one. 

*

"Okay?" Bucky asks, his hands as steady as he can make them as he runs his finger just under the edge of the buckle, making sure it isn't too tight against Clint's skin. Clint lets out a little shaky breath, his eyes dilated-dark again, and it's about all Bucky can do to step back, his eyes locked on Clint's face and the way he looks, like this. 

He'd dressed carefully to come along tonight. Not in his best, if there's anything in his closet that can even be called that, but in a close-fitting gray Henley and a pair of once-black jeans that are worn thin along the line of his thighs. He's not even close to knowing what he's doing here, but whatever the hell it is it's coiled up warm in his stomach, and it's better than anything else he's got going on. 

Clint's smile when he saw him, the brief up-and-down look the guy gave him, that coiled up warm in there too. 

"Okay," Clint says, on a rush of breath. Bucky mouths the word he'd been given - _Budapest_ \- and Clint's smile firms up a little and he nods his head just the barest, the type of almost-unnoticeable confirmation used by spies. Type of thing they use with people they trust. 

Clint's sitting behind the table he always uses, one of those wash-worn shirts of his lying soft against his skin. The tag's sticking up at the back, and Bucky takes a moment to tuck it under the collar of his shirt, his fingers brushing against warm skin.

He figures he's probably imagining the briefest movement, like Clint's leaning into him. 

"Okay," Clint says, as Bucky retreats behind the camera again, flicking the ‘record’ button. "So these things, you've gotta make sure that there's someone you trust as back up, okay? That'd be my glamorous assistant, over there." 

He lifts his hands up a little, and Bucky carefully zooms out so the width of the spreader bar can be seen, not incidentally catching the curve of Clint's biceps, which are strained tight as he seems to subconsciously tug against the cuffs on his wrists. 

"So these're - these're part of a set, actually, so you can restrain the arms and legs and then link them together, which - which is, uh." His mouth quirks a little up at the corner, nothing that could be counted as a real smile, and his nostrils flare. "Which is something I'm sure some of you guys can get behind. The cuffs are -" he tugs on them again, a little sharper, the rattle of the cuffs loud in the otherwise silent room. "You guys know me, right, I'm all kinds of fancy, and if I'm honest these cuffs -" he's twisting his wrists against them, now - "these cuffs aren't what I'd choose? I don't -" He looks away from the camera and up to catch Bucky's eye, his breathing shallow, and not in the good way that Bucky'd been expecting. "They're, um. Pretty rough," he says, his tone of voice off by degrees, and he's got his hands curled in, his fingers straining; no attempt is gonna get him close to the buckles though, and Bucky's pretty sure that's goddamn panic in his eyes. 

"Clint -" he breathes, and Clint sucks in a breath that's more like a gasp for air. 

"Fuck," Clint says, his tone of voice worn thin by his uneven breathing, "fuck fuck fuck these're like something I found in Budapest -" 

Bucky drops the camera onto the table and lunges across to Clint - too fast, too fucking fast, because Clint can't help but flinch backwards and almost fall off his chair, and whatever colour he's got left in his face drains out of it when Bucky grabs the bar between Clint's cuffs to help him keep his goddamn balance. 

"Fuck," Clint says, soft as water, jagged as rocks, "fuck, Budapest, Budapest, _please_ \- "

Bucky's fingers feel clumsy as hell as he fumbles at the stiff buckles. All he can hear is the thin, sharp breaths that Clint's sucking in, the almost inaudible whining when he breathes out. 

"It's okay," he says, as low and even as he can make it, "it's okay, Clint, I've got this, we'll have you out of these in just a second, okay? You're safe here, I've got you. See? There's one." He takes a moment to sweep his thumb across the soft skin of Clint's inner wrist, proof positive that the goddamn cuff is gone, before he starts working on the other one.

"Fuck," Clint says, barely breathes it out, his head tilting forward so the wash of warm air curls along Bucky's neck. "Oh, fuck me." 

"And that's two," Bucky says, taking the bar and tossing it aside hard enough to take a dent outta the damn wall. "They're gone, Clint, you're okay. I'm here, okay?" He doesn't know what the hell to do with his hands. 

Clint’s breathing is choppy still, even with the bar gone, too fast and too short, just shy of hyperventilating, and Bucky’s at a loss. His thumb keeps stroking across the tender skin of Clint’s wrist, and Bucky’s still mumbling nonsense, but it doesn’t seem to help. He scrambles for a solution, trying to think what Steve used to do when Bucky woke up from nightmares, before he’d finally got enough of a handle on himself to not need Steve’s constant reassurance. 

“You’re fine,” Bucky tells Clint, soft but firm. He breathes in, slow and deep and steady, hoping to encourage Clint to mimic him. 

He does, slowly, so slowly, until they’re breathing together, until Clint isn’t panting against Bucky’s shoulder like he’s run a mile in enemy territory, and damned if Bucky doesn’t know exactly how that feels. 

“You’re fine,” Bucky says again, and Clint takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“Yeah,” he rasps.

Bucky realizes Clint is trembling, fine muscle tremors under his hands, the one on his wrist and the one Bucky hadn’t even realized he’d settled on Clint’s shoulder. 

Clint leans back in the chair, his head tilted back and his eyes closed as he breathes through, and Bucky takes a risk, slides his hand up Clint’s shoulder and to the base of his neck, where he can just feel Clint’s pulse pounding under his fingertips. Clint peeks at him through his lashes.

He’ll be embarrassed, Bucky figures, remembering how he’d felt every single time he’d had to lean on Steve. 

“I’m gonna go get you some water,” Bucky says, in that same sure tone. The one that doesn’t leave room for argument but doesn’t sound like he’s bossing, either. “I’ll be right back.”

Clint closes his eyes again and Bucky takes that for assent.

In the main living area of the apartment, Bucky beelines for the fridge and finds, to his surprise, a couple of bottles of water and purple sports drinks in the fridge. There’s also a half-eaten pizza and a nearly empty jug of orange juice. On his way back to the little office in the back of the apartment, Bucky snags a purple blanket off the arm of the couch, where it’s been left in a wrinkled pile, obviously recently used.

By the time Bucky gets back to the office slash video room, Clint is sitting up in the chair only looking a little less worse for wear. He’s still pale and he looks the wrong side of rueful, like he’s expecting Bucky to judge him. 

He’s also still shivering, just a bit, Bucky can tell even from a distance. He’s got his hands tucked between his thighs, and he’s absentmindedly rubbing at his left wrist, the one Bucky hadn’t touched.

“I got options,” Bucky says, walking through the door. He holds up the drinks and the blanket. He doesn’t leave time for Clint to argue, just drapes the blanket over his shoulders like being tucked in by the Winter goddamn Soldier is a given, is a thing they do, and offers up both bottles. Clint reluctantly takes the sports drink, cracking the lid and sipping at it.

“Sorry,” he manages, after a moment. “Didn’t mean to freak out on you.”

Bucky snorts. “I used to wake up blubbering in Steve’s lap, you’re doin’ alright from where I’m standin’.”

Clint blinks at him like he’s surprised to hear that Bucky’s struggled. Bucky’s killed more people than he can count and their faces haunt his dreams. Bucky doesn’t know what a good night’s sleep feels like, or at least he hadn’t until he started listening to Clint’s videos like fucked-up lullabies. 

“Okay,” Clint says, like he’s choosing not to argue the point. He visibly steels himself, sips a little more of the sports drink. “Okay, give me five minutes and we’ll start over.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to blink. “We’ll do what?”

Clint sighs. “I gotta do the video, it’s a paid review from the company.”

Bucky glances over at the slightly-mangled spreader bar that’s lying on the ground several feet away. He thinks he can probably straighten it out with his hand if he’s careful, but he can’t think of a good reason why he should. Bucky hasn’t done a _lot_ of therapy - he did the minimum mandated amount and he mostly hated it - but he’s done enough to know what a trigger is, even when it’s not the kind Hydra had put in his head. 

“Oh hell no,” he says, without thinking. “If it’s gotta be done that badly, I’ll do it.”

“Wait, what?” Clint is squinting at him like he’s lost his mind, and maybe he has. But Bucky can’t watch Clint put himself through that again, because they’re _friends_ if nothing else, and-

“I’ll do it,” Bucky says again, giving a little shrug. “It’s not like the thing can hold me.” He flexes his arm for good measure, listening to the reassuring click of the plates recalibrating. “You’ll have to do the talkin’ though,” he tells Clint, chewing at his bottom lip. “I’m not so good at talkin’ anymore.”

Clint has some kinda look on his face - something soft and fond and different from anything Bucky has ever seen before. “You do alright,” Clint reassures him, echoing Bucky’s own words back at him. 

They stare at each other for a little while, something quiet and unspoken between them as Clint drinks his frankly alarming-looking drink and huddles into what Bucky now realizes is a badly-knitted afghan. When the drink is gone, Clint tosses the bottle, sight unseen, directly into a trashcan, and then stands and stretches, letting the blanket fall onto his chair. Bucky is momentarily stunned, watching as Clint’s t-shirt stretches across his shoulders and rides up, just a little, above his waistband. It reveals a vulnerable strip of pale skin that Bucky can’t help but stare at. 

He is definitely queerer than he’d believed himself to be, that’s for damn sure.

Bucky wonders if he should ask Steve a few more questions about his history; if maybe this isn’t something new, but only something Bucky’s relearning about himself.

“How do you wanna do this?” Clint says, and-

Honestly, it takes Bucky a second to remember what they’re even talking about.

“You’re the expert,” he says, shrugging helplessly. 

Bucky ends up in Clint’s chair, the spreader bar that’s wrapped around his wrists an almost negligible weight as Clint fusses around him, tucking his hair back and smoothing his shirt and just generally hovering anxiously, before Bucky finally arches an eyebrow at him and Clint retreats. He perches on the barstool that seems like it’s never left the corner Bucky put it in to start with, and raises the camera. Halfway through the motion though, it seems like he changes his mind and he glances around, eyes lighting on a little box on the floor Bucky hadn’t noticed before. Clint turns it upside down on the barstool and carefully balances the camera on top of it, which is, clearly, what he’s been doing in Bucky’s absence. He backs away slowly, hands outstretched in case it’s gonna fall, and then breathes a sigh of relief when it doesn’t.

Clint circles around Bucky and just like that the on-screen personality comes out, and he’s talking about strength and durability, the fit of the cuffs, and the way they chafe against skin. He slides a finger between Bucky’s left wrist and the cuff, smirking a little, and Bucky takes his cues from Clint’s body language, arching an eyebrow at the camera and shifting to recalibrate the arm. Clint mentions how the buckles aren’t quick-release, something he thinks is important for restraint play - and remembering how he’d struggled to get them off Clint quick enough, Bucky can’t help but agree. 

There’s a second spreader bar as well, the one Clint had tried to mention in the first review, and he holds it up for the camera, but sets it aside quickly enough. 

It’s a quick video, made quicker by the fact that Bucky’s anxious to be done with it but content to watch Clint work his on-screen magic, so long as he doesn’t have to do any of it himself. His only job is to sit and hold his arms up on the edge of the table so the bar can be easily seen. The metal arm is on display this way too, at least from mid-forearm to hand, because Clint had tugged his sleeve out of the way, and some distant part of Bucky’s brain informs him that if Steve ever sees this they’re going to veer past embarrassed and tumble off the cliff of ‘unable to speak of this, ever’ pretty rapidly. 

He can’t make himself care.

At the end, Clint acknowledges that while some people might find it a plus, he thinks the difficulty of getting out of the bar independently is a definite drawback - so Bucky takes the opportunity to twist his wrist, flexing the plates of the arm and employing a little brute strength - and the cuff snaps like a rubber band, leaving Bucky’s left hand free.

He waggles his fingers at the camera.

“Show-off,” Clint chuckles, eyes twinkling, all signs of his panic attack fully gone now.

Bucky shrugs in response, grinning helplessly in the face of Clint’s good humor. 

*

Bucky wakes up from the kind of deep, dreamless sleep that he’d thought was beyond him now. He thinks it maybe has something to do with the way he’d felt useful, helping Clint with the panic attack; helping with the video too. After, Clint had shown Bucky a little bit about how he edits them down, cutting out the extra bits like Clint fluffing Bucky’s hair in the middle - some unconscious moment Bucky hadn’t even registered - and the way he trims the video so that the shots of Clint walking away from and towards the camera are gone.

Which, frankly, is a goddamn shame considering how he’d looked in those jeans, which is a thought Bucky is only sort of comfortable with having. 

He’s pretty well accepted the fact that he’s attracted to Clint. He’s just not sure he’s ready to fully explore what that means, and he’s got no idea whether Clint feels the same. 

Reaching for his phone, Bucky’s surprised to see it’s late morning - almost lunchtime - so he’s not only slept well, he’s slept late, and there’s a text waiting for him from Clint. 

_Thanks for the aftercare._

That’s a new word - something he’ll have to look up, in a minute or two. 

First, he reaches for a protein bar and one of the suspiciously-colored drinks in his box of snacks, and then he gets on Clint’s website. He’s checking to see if the video had gone up last night and not surprised to find that it has. It’s got a lot more hits than Bucky’s used to seeing on a new post, and a helluva lot more comments too. 

The first one - first because it’s got the most thumbs up, not because it was the first one to be made - is someone flinging words around in all capital letters, which Bucky knows is the equivalent of shouting on the internet.

_hoLY SHIT SHOLY SHIT IS THAT THE *WINTER SOLDIER*. DUDE. DUDE ARE YOU DATING BUCKY FUCKING BARNES???!?!?!?!?!?!?!_

Bucky rolls his eyes.

What captures his attention, though, is the response from _CupidsToyBox_, which is Clint’s blog moniker. 

_I should be so lucky. Dude is entirely out of my league._

Bucky reads the words and takes a deep breath, then reads them again and he still doesn’t know how to react.

His therapist always liked to tell him that he’s got a compulsive need to constantly feel in control, a way of coping with all the times he was being controlled by others, and right now, he’s feeling desperately out of control.

His identity is something precious, something he has slowly and carefully mapped out through the scarred remains of what Hydra left him. He has been piecing together bits of fragmented memory and things he’s learned about himself since he broke through the Hydra conditioning, putting together a patchwork understanding of who he is now. He knows that it’s a different man than the one who fell from that train, and a different man than the one who went off to war thinking he could make a difference, and a different man than Steve Rogers knew before everything went to hell.

It has been careful and slow and deliberate.

And nothing about this thing with Clint feels careful or slow or deliberate at all.

He feels out of control and overwhelmed and fuck, up until he watched Clint come on camera, he hadn’t even realized they were playing the same sport, nevermind whether or not they’re in the same league.

He’s restless and off-balance and he’s got to do something to make him feel in control, so he slams his laptop shut, dresses in loose-fitting clothes and goes down to the gym.

It’s empty so he goes a few rounds with the punching bag, which is usually more Steve’s thing than his, but it’s helping soothe him. He just keeps hitting the specially-reinforced bag again and again with his fists until he’s bathed in sweat and panting, and his brain has stopped running in circles and his right hand has stopped shaking -- the metal one never trembles which is one of the things he hates most about it.

The angle of the sun is lower when he’s finally got the mess of confusion and anxiety locked away where it belongs deep in his chest, and then he’s got time to think about other things --

Like being out of Clint Barton’s league.

Bucky snorts and grabs the bag to stop it swinging. 

Clint had probably just been joking. Just brushing the commenter off in the easiest way possible, aiming not to hurt any feelings but still clarifying that he is not, and wouldn’t ever be interested in, dating the Winter Soldier.

Bucky curses a little under his breath and grabs a towel to wipe the sweat from his throat and turns to go.

Clint’s leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, and he straightens abruptly when Bucky turns and sees him there. His cheeks are a little flushed and his eyes a little wide. 

“Hey.”

And it’s so much less complicated than Bucky’s brain was making it out to be, now that he’s standing here in front of Clint, who looks rumpled and sleepy despite the fact that it’s late afternoon and who’d been watching him for god knows how long.

Of course Bucky’s gonna be attracted to Clint. It’s easy as breathing and just as simple.

“Hi,” Bucky says, and if it comes out a little breathy, he’s gonna blame the fact that he’d just spent a few hours working out. 

“You seemed really into what you were doing,” Clint tells him, shifting awkwardly and rubbing at the back of his neck. His cheeks are still flushed and he seems unable to look at Bucky for overly long before his gaze skitters awkwardly away again. “But you didn’t come down for breakfast. Or for lunch. And I just wanted to check that you were okay. I know things got weird, and --”

“Nothin’s weird,” Bucky tells him, and it feels true down to his bones. “Just had some shit to work out.”

“Anything I can help with?” Clint asks, falling into step beside him.

“Nah,” Bucky says, easy. “You’re helpin’ plenty already.”

*

They play Mario Kart and eat epic sandwiches and piles of disgusting junk food for the rest of the day, which is just about the most perfect day Bucky can imagine. The other Avengers are busy at some sort of Official Event that Clint scammed his way out of, citing lingering pain from whatever injury he’s given himself this week, between training and Avenging and his own clumsiness, and they’ve got the place to themselves.

It’s getting late and Bucky’s just about to make some sort of excuse to go to bed - not because he’s tired, but Clint looks like he’s going to fall asleep in the middle of Rainbow Road, when the elevator slides open and Steve strides in, looking around with narrow eyes.

“Good,” he says. “You guys are alone.”

“Of course we’re alone,” Bucky says, slowly. “You took all the other Avengers with you. Stark said the fundraiser was gonna go all night.”

Steve waves that off and now that Bucky’s paying attention, he looks a little frayed around the edges, a little high-strung.

“Something happen, Stevie?”

“Yeah,” Clint says, pausing the game, despite the fact that Bucky was about to fucking win. He grabs his coffee mug even though it’s going on midnight, and takes a long swallow. “You get your butt pinched by a senator again? Need us to go kick some ass?”

“No,” Steve says. “And butt pinching is a serious offense. But no. That’s not -- I wanted to talk to you about-” He pauses, grimaces, and sits down on the coffee table in front of them, rubbing both hands nervously on his thighs and it gives Bucky an instant flashback to those ridiculous videos Steve did, the ones about homework and detention and puberty that Stark had taken great pleasure in sharing with Bucky when he’d first come to the tower.

“You know you guys can tell me anything, right?” Steve says, fumbling with a tablet Bucky has just noticed he’s carrying, and trying to do that thing that Stark always makes look so effortless, that ends up projecting whatever’s on the pad into nifty holograms for everyone to see. “I’m not gonna -- I’m not the judgemental type.”

Bucky makes a vague sound of agreement as he shoves a handful of Doritos into his mouth, and then Steve finally gets it right and the holograms pop up.

It’s a bunch of gossip blogs about the Winter Soldier dating a PornHub sensation and Bucky starts to choke on his mouthful of Doritos.

Before he can suffocate, Clint shoots him a sympathetic glance and hands his coffee over.

Sharing his motherfucking coffee. Bucky shoots him a narrow-eyed look and tries not to read too much into it even as he takes a few desperate, lifesaving swallows. When he finally slides the mug back with a small, grateful smile, Clint’s cheeks are a little pink and Bucky wants to read a whole bunch into that.

And Steve, when Bucky looks back at him, is staring at them both and the shared mug between them with a suspicious frown on his face. Shit.

“The thing,” Steve says, after clearing his throat, carrying on as if Bucky’s near death and Clint’s heroic sacrifice hadn’t happened at all, “is that everyone at the fundraiser was talking about this and I just wish I’d heard it from you first, is all. I’m not mad, I just wish you knew you could talk to me. Both of you.”

Bucky just stares at the images, trying to figure out how to explain what he’s just starting to understand himself.

_Winter Soldier caught with PornHub Sensation!_ one website proclaims. _Sexy Soldier gets down and dirty with PornHub Twink_, says another. 

He isn’t nearly in the right headspace to discuss a bunch of journalists with their heads so far up their asses that they thought him being in one fucking video meant anything more than what it means.

Which is nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. And if it does mean anything, that’s up to him and up to Clint and not up to the gossip rags with nothing better to do than speculate.

Friends help friends review sex toys all the time. 

Before he can snarl something to that effect, Clint snorts, swallows noisily, and points his mug at the hologram. “I wear my own fuckin’ merch, Cap,” he says, rolling his eyes. “And yet no one’s caught on to the fact that I’m a goddamn Avenger. I owe Nat twenty bucks.”

“I don’t think that’s the issue here,” Steve says, sounding severe, and Bucky straightens up, crossing his arms, metal arm recalibrating in a way that most people would know is a threat. 

“Stevie,” he says, nice and low, because if someone’s gonna get shouted at for accidentally outing Clint’s side hustle to the trashy online gossip rags, it sure as shit ain’t gonna be Clint.

Steve throws up both hands and now he looks _hurt_, like they’ve betrayed him somehow. “Just -- just, why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.

“Well. I mean,” Clint shares a wide-eyed, perplexed look with Bucky, and says, “Honestly, I thought you knew? Nat knows. I’m pretty sure Tony knows -- he’s been making jokes about lube for weeks.”

“You told _Natasha_ and _Tony_ that you two were involved and you didn’t tell _me_?” Steve gasps.

It takes a moment. An embarrassingly long moment. And then Bucky says, stunned, “You don’t seriously think we’re dating, Stevie. C’mon.”

Clint makes a funny sound, a startled inhale that catches strangely in his chest, and Bucky doesn’t like the way Clint looks away from him really quickly and sets his coffee mug down. He looks a little pale but his lips quirk up in something like a smile and he says, “Yeah, Cap. Bucky’s just- he’s just helping me out with a project.”

Bucky wants to reach out and touch him to soothe that expression off his face, but he doesn’t know if it’s something Clint even wants him to do.

“A project that involves…” Steve hesitates, looking at the picture on the gossip blog. It’s a screen grab of the video, Bucky facing the camera, both hands clenched into fists and latched between the spreader bar. He’s looking up at Clint with a faint smile, his biceps are all flexed and looking pretty good, if he does say so, and Clint’s got one hand on Bucky’s shoulder and a strange, soft smile on his face as he looks down at him. His other hand’s up, gesturing, because he’s always moving when he’s talking.

His biceps look pretty good too.

And looking at the picture, Bucky can’t help but wonder if maybe Clint’s been thinking about things the same way Bucky has been.

“What even is that?” Steve asks, after the silence grows long and awkward. “Is that a _torture device_?”

Clint smothers a little bit of nervous laughter and keeps his hand pressed to his mouth, leaving Bucky to say, casual, “It’s a spreader bar, Steve. For sex. Not the fanciest model, though. It’s a little rough on the wrists. Not the best, especially not for beginners, if you want to know the truth.”

Steve looks from Bucky to the picture and back again, like he’s still not getting it, and Clint clears his throat and says, “If you’re in the market for a beginner bar, Steve, I recommend the Purple Reins 12 incher. It’s for thighs, not wrists, but it’s much softer, and, uh. Purple. Which is a good colour on just about anybody.”

“So. So you’re not dating but you’re. You’re ‘hooking up’?” Steve says it with finger quotes.

Bucky shakes his head slowly, and says, “Nah, Stevie. Clint’s entirely outta my league.”

He can practically feel Clint's startled gaze on the side of his face, and it's an effort of will not to look back, not to let every goddamn thing he's been feeling show in his eyes. Bucky just scratches at the stubble on his throat, settling back into the couch and kind of enjoying how awkward Steve looks about all of this. 

"Why're we talkin' about this, Stevie?" 

Steve's expression evolves through a couple of distinct expressions, hurt and annoyance being prime among them, but when it's done it's settled into the steel-jawed resolution to be supportive that Steve'd worn when Bucky'd first told him that he liked the New York Giants over the Dodgers. However much of an asshole he can be at times, Bucky loves the punk and he would've grown into loving him, he's pretty sure, even if he'd never gotten around to remembering him. 

"Well, I mean - I'm pretty sure I'm obliged to tell you that we have a PR department," Steve says, and he's flushing a little pink along his cheekbones. "And that Tony's fielding some pretty irate phone calls about the two of you comin' out without any kinda consultation." 

"Pretty sure Tony's _ignoring_ some phone calls," Clint mutters, and Steve sighs. 

"Yeah, probably. Still, we could've done with a heads up; we'll have to have a team briefing, talk through how we're gonna react to all this." 

"And how's that?" Bucky asks, and he doesn't mean to sound so fragile about it. Clint shifts a little closer to him, leaning his weight in a different way until they're nearly touching, until Bucky can feel his body heat and feel absurdly reassured by it. 

"Buck," Steve says, drawn out, a little like he's calling him an idiot. "You know we're gonna support you, that's not in question. Even if you chose to come out by dating a porn star." 

"We're not dating," Bucky corrects him, but he doubts Steve hears it over Clint’s offended noises. 

"_Adult entertainer_," he says, "and technically I'm not even that. And how come I'm the only one who's offended that no one knows who I am?" 

"You're a spy, people ain't _supposed_ to know who you are," Bucky says, reaching out to pat Clint soothingly on the thigh - maybe a little higher up than he'd intended, and he snatches his hand back at Clint's soft indrawn breath. 

"It makes things easier, anyway." Steve doesn't notice the tiny moment of tension and pushes himself up off the coffee table, switching the television off before slumping into one of the armchairs, his posture losing the Captain America posture entirely and becoming one hundred percent Steve. "Tony and I had already discussed how we were gonna handle you coming out, Buck, so there's a foundation for a media strategy already in place. Figuring in something between the two of you -" 

Bucky's leaning forward before he even registers it, sitting on the edge of his seat, hands on his knees and curled into fists. 

"So this," he says, his voice uncertain, "me bein' queer, this isn't new?" 

There's this look that Steve gets, when Bucky's not quite who he expects him to be. Unhappiness edged with disappointment, anger riding in on its coat tails and settling in to stay. This look, this one's different. Steve looks shocked, and then murderous, and then so filled with miserable sympathy that some of it spills over into Bucky, scooping out a hole to settle in just inside his chest. 

"You don't remember," Steve says, soft and low. "I mean, of course you don't remember, but -" 

"Hierarchy of needs," Clint says, an unexpected interjection with an unexpected stringing together of words. When Bucky looks at him, he forms a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers and offers a little smile. "Tasha told me about it. About how you can't even start thinking about stuff like relationships until you're fed, and sheltered, and safe." 

And - and that's it, isn't it? How Clint - how all of them, but maybe especially Clint - has worked so hard to make him feel _safe_. It makes something warm settle inside Bucky and he rubs absently at his chest. 

"I haven’t remembered, not yet," Bucky says, and he can't help the little sideways look at Clint. "I think maybe I’m gettin’ there."

*

Bucky's not sure when Clint finally got up and left. He knows the guy ordered them pizza on his way out, which is the sort of thoughtful that Bucky's starting to expect and that he appreciates more than he's got words for. He's been caught up, though, enough to not notice JARVIS lowering the lights in the room around them, as Steve has told him a little more about the guy he used to be. 

"I dunno." Steve's folded his pizza all careful, but it doesn't stop the sauce dripping down his front; Bucky snorts out half a laugh and Steve shoots him a half-assed glare, and it fits like a worn sweater, soft and warm. "I never knew many of the guys’ names, 'cos not a lot of them made it past -" he makes a lewd gesture that Stark'd be shocked by, because Bucky's not the only one settling back into how they used to be. Around his own pizza, Bucky's mouth curls into a grin. “The girls, sure, but not so much the men.”

"Love 'em and leave 'em, that's me," Bucky says, halfway knowing that ain't true even before Steve's mouth opens in automatic protest. 

"It was just more difficult back then," he says. "You introduced me to a couple." He takes a moment and thinks hard. "Charlie. There was definitely a Charlie." 

"Redhead," Bucky ventures, after a moment, and the grin on Steve's face is the kind of delighted that lights up a room. 

"Redhead," he confirms, with a sly grin, "although you always seemed to prefer blonds." 

Bucky can't help going a little pink at that. 

"I'm happy for you," Steve says after a moment, his voice losing the teasing along the way. 

"It ain't like that," Bucky automatically responds, but he eases up after a second and sends Steve half a smile. "Maybe not yet." 

Steve exaggerates a sigh. "Seriously? Out of all the options, you pick the guy who eats pizza off the floor?" 

"I picked the guy that makes me laugh," Bucky says, as the least horrifically sappy of his reasons; he's a little surprised that he's got a list, ready and waiting to go.

The confessional mood can't last forever, though. Eventually Steve asks JARVIS to turn up the lights, and it's not long after that that they're wrestling over a computer controller, Steve trying to slap it out of Bucky's hands as he laps him once again. When they're eventually done, gray edging back into the sky outside the windows, Bucky lets Steve fold him into one of the hugs they haven't shared in nearly eighty years. Lets _himself_ relax into it, burying his face in Steve's shoulder and letting the guy keep watch for a second. 

"Okay," Steve says, his voice a little thick when they pull apart. "Okay, _tomorrow_ we'll talk media strategy, jerk." 

"Tomorrow." Bucky lifts his hand in an awkward goodbye and heads for his room, cheeks aching from wearing out his smile. 

It's habit to check his computer now before he goes to bed, even if he knows there's no way Clint's posted anything new. A message pops up to let him know there's something new in his official Avengers inbox, the one that's usually just dumb newsletters and minutes for meetings that JARVIS faithfully transcribes. 

The email has got a flapping flag at the top of it, all the colours of the rainbow, with a message typed underneath. 

'Hey, Bucky,' it says, and he doesn't even have to scroll down to the end to know it's from Clint. 'Just a few resources I thought you might need - queer guy 101, from one of us to another. Let me know if you've got any questions, okay?' 

There's a list of links that fill the rest of the email, ranging from a Wikipedia Article entitled 'History of same-sex marriage in the United States' to a list of gay bars rated by drink price and whether or not they have darts. There's a couple of additions at the end that Bucky wonders if Clint maybe hesitated over - one called 'Your Prostate and You,' and another about how to ask guys out, which Bucky carefully navigates to and bookmarks, for later. He's starting to think not so much later, though. 

'Thanks for the links,' he types back, meaning it with everything in him, but there's a little mischief in him that insists he adds, 'but I've already seen some of your videos so maybe I oughta be on queer guy 201?' 

Bucky doesn’t get a reply right away, but he isn’t expecting one either. He and Clint had sat up most of the night screwing around and then he and Steve were up the rest of it. Dawn is peeking through his windows, not the pale grey of the rising sun but the brilliant oranges and reds that mean it’s going to be blazing over the skyline within the next half an hour, and Bucky needs to get some sleep. His eyes feel gritty and his body is tired - but in a good way. In a way that feels solid and safe. Steve has confirmed his deepest wonderings and Clint has accepted him just as he is and he maybe, just might, have something like a chance with the guy who has given him that spark of attraction for the first time in seventy years. 

Climbing in between the sheets doesn’t feel like the possibility of punishment that it usually does. Bucky’s pretty sure he’s gonna sleep soundly this morning. JARVIS darkens his windows without being asked, and Bucky drifts off more comfortably than he can remember doing anytime this century. 

**

When he wakes up hours later, it’s with a clear sense of purpose. Steve’s right - they need to talk, and they need to figure out what to do about the idiotic tabloids and the sure-to-come negative press, but Bucky can’t do any of that until he sorts some things out. With himself and with Clint, too. 

He heads over to Steve’s apartment, not waiting for an invitation. Steve is tucked into the corner of the couch in a patch of sunlight with a sketchbook in his lap, and it’s like being shifted back in time. The only difference is the incredibly changed scenery, the sleek modern lines of the furniture and the fact that neither one of them is sweating their balls off in the New York summer. 

“What’s up, Bucky?” Steve says, barely glancing up from whatever’s got his attention in the book.

“I wanna talk about the thing with the papers,” Bucky admits, shuffling his feet. 

Steve closes his book and sets it aside, giving Bucky his undivided attention. He looks a little concerned and determined, and under that the unending willingness to fight the entire fucking world if that’s what Bucky needs. Hell, Steve _has_ fought the entire world, just about, to get Bucky to where he’s at. This is nothing by comparison. 

“I’m not ready,” Bucky blurts out, the words wrenched from somewhere deep inside himself. “Maybe I’m queer - pretty sure I am, all things considered - but I’m still workin’ it out, and I don’t wanna give interviews and I don’t wanna be in the paper. If you gotta give a statement, that’s fine. You can say whatever you need to, but I’m not gonna talk to any reporters, and I don’t want Clint dragged into it.”

Steve sighs, his mouth pinching up a little. “It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes who he is, you know.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, like it’s that easy. “But I want him to have whatever time that is. I haven’t talked to him - I don’t know what he wants. If that’s - I don’t know that he’s… It might just be me, y’know?”

The face Steve makes is soft and open and a little bittersweet. “I don’t think that’s true,” he says gently, like he knows how fragile all this feels to Bucky. “But Tony and I can buy you some space, maybe. A little. Time to talk, anyhow.”

It’s a stay of execution. The media isn’t gonna let the possibility that the Winter Soldier is queer go and as soon as someone catches on to the fact that the other guy in the video is an Avenger, well, that’s gonna be a media circus that none of them are prepared for. 

But Steve will do his best to shield Bucky, the same way he has since he brought him in from Hydra, the same way Bucky did when Steve was barely more than skin and bones and attitude, but still ready to take on the world with a trash can lid. That’s just what they _do,_ that’s just what they _are._ That’s what the end of the line has always meant for them. 

“Thanks Stevie,” Bucky says, and Steve moves like he’s gonna stand up, like he’s gonna subject Bucky to another one of his meaningful hugs, but Bucky’s far too brittle for that. He feels like every inch of him is on display, all his tender pieces exposed and easily damaged, and he’s liable to shake apart if Steve hugs him with the kind of tender sympathy Bucky can see on his face. 

So Bucky slips out of the apartment with a ducked head and a grateful smile and heads back to his own space to recoup. He just needs to get his head together a little bit, and then he’ll go see Clint. Clint knows more about this than Bucky does anyway, and maybe Bucky would’ve liked to have taken a bit more time and been a little more solid in his foundation before he brought it up, but he doesn’t think Clint’s gonna do anything to hurt him, even if all Bucky’s feelings and wonderings are completely one-sided. That’s not the sort of guy Clint’s shown himself to be so it’s just the fear of rejection Bucky’s got to handle, not the worry that he’ll lose a friend over it. He doesn’t think he _could_ lose Clint over much of anything, at this point. He’s not sure how he knows that, but he’s certain of it in his gut. 

He doesn’t get the chance to regroup though, because when he gets back to his apartment, Clint is slouched outside his door in raggedy sweatpants and a hoodie that looks like Hulk could comfortably wear it. It’s a garish purple color and the sight of Clint, barefoot and sleep rumpled, makes Bucky smile even through his mounting anxiety. 

“Hey,” Bucky says, and Clint glances up, looking a little wide-eyed, like he’s caught between opposing emotions. 

“You watched my videos?” Clint blurts out, then winces. 

Bucky gently nudges him aside so he can get to the door, palming his way through the security system. “Not all of them,” he says, as the door opens and Clint follows him inside. “Just some. The Q&A ones, at first. I watched all of those. And then -” Bucky feels his face flush, remembering, “- a few of the others. The ones that seemed relevant.”

Clint looks fascinated, probably because Bucky’s the color of a ripe tomato. “Which ones were relevant?” he asks like he can’t help himself, and the edges of a smirk are playing at his lips. Bucky rolls his eyes. 

“The lube video, for starters,” Bucky settles on, finally. “A lot has changed since the ‘40s.”

The snort that gets him makes Bucky grin. He heads straight for the kitchen, flicking the coffee pot on and listening to it gurgle. Clint makes a noise of intense relief, like just the idea of coffee is enough to help him get sorted. They don’t talk while the coffee brews, bubbling and hissing its way into the pot, and they’re still silent while Bucky pours two mugs, fixing Clint’s up just the way he remembers seeing him do it himself in the communal kitchen. Clint will drink coffee any way he can get it, Bucky knows, but he likes it best with a little milk and plenty of sugar, and hot enough to scald the roof of his mouth. He passes the mug over and Clint stares at it moodily for a minute before taking a sip. Clint hums a little at the taste, so Bucky knows he made it right, and then he glances at Bucky over the rim. 

Bucky occupies himself with his own coffee, not quite able to meet Clint’s gaze. 

“We should talk,” Clint says, finally, after his mug is empty and Bucky is in the process of refilling it. 

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, passing the mug back over. “I talked to Steve already. He’s gonna keep your name outta it as best he can. Make some kinda statement about the media minding its own business, I guess. I told him I don’t wanna do any interviews or anything. He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to stall for long.”

Clint’s brow is furrowed like none of that makes any sense at all. “You shouldn’t have to come out if you don’t wanna, Buck. It’s private.”

Bucky shrugs. “It’s fine,” he says, even though it isn’t, not really. It’s not fair that he’s gotta expose this part of himself, this part he’s just relearning. But life ain’t fair, and it is what it is. No take-backs. 

“I’m sorry,” Clint says, all miserable, hunched over on himself. “It’s my fault, I-”

“No!” Bucky says, because none of this is going how he wanted, how he expected it to go. Part of that’s because Bucky didn’t have time to prepare, but mostly it’s because he’d forgot how easily Clint blames himself for things. “It’s not your fault. I made a choice and I don’t regret it. I’m _glad,”_ he says, fierce. “I’m glad it was you that helped me figure myself out. The press thing sucks, yeah, but the rest of it-” Bucky takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff, unable to see the bottom. It’s a leap of faith. “I’m not sorry, and I hope you’re not sorry either.”

It feels like a confession, even though it’s not much at all. It’s barely an admission. But Clint is watching him with those ocean-blue eyes, like awareness is dawning on him, and Bucky forces himself to hold still, to meet that gaze, to be exposed to it. “I’m glad,” he says again, quiet. 

Clint seems to decide something between one blink and the next, because he loses the hunched-up posture and the wince, his face going kind of soft around the edges. “Me too,” he says, a little bit hesitant, like it’s his confession too. 

They’re sitting close together at the tiny kitchenette table, so close their knees are nearly knocking and it’s almost nothing to close the space between them. Clint reaches out to touch Bucky’s jaw reverently, like Bucky’s something special, something worthwhile, and Bucky turns his face into it and lets his cheek rest in Clint’s big, calloused palm. Clint is watching him intently, his eyes darting, catching every micro expression on Bucky’s face, the way Bucky is looking back at him just the same. He leans in, slow and careful, watching Bucky all the time, until they’re too close to be more than just a blur to each other, and then Clint’s mouth is against Bucky’s, soft and warm and chaste, just a bare brush of lips that still manages to send a shiver down Bucky’s spine. 

“Is this okay?” Clint says, into the bare sliver of space between them.

“Yeah,” Bucky tells him, something swelling up inside of him that he’s not quite ready to name. “Yeah, it’s perfect.”

They don’t make it past a few soft, easy kisses, tentative the way all new things are, but also wary because Bucky still doesn’t _know how to do this._ He knows he likes Clint - more than likes - and he knows he’s got a history, but he doesn’t _remember_, so this is all new for him. Brand new and delicate, and it feels as fragile as spun glass between them. Clint must understand that, because he gets his fill of the delicate kisses and then heads back to his own apartment, looking a little pink around the edges and as content as Bucky has ever seen him. 

So Bucky’s alone, folded up in the corner of the couch with a book Sam gave him that’s nothing but mindless sci-fi when the package arrives. It’s addressed to the Winter Soldier and CupidsToyBox, and Bucky’s got no damn idea what the hell to do with it.

*

“So, here’s the thing,” Bucky says the next morning, after Clint answered his door to Bucky’s knock.

Clint looks sleep-rumpled and confused, and at Bucky’s serious tone, his eyes widen a little bit and he shifts his weight to a stance Bucky’s seen before in the gym, when he’s getting ready to take a blow. Like he thinks the only serious thing Bucky can be here to discuss is gonna hurt. Like maybe he’s worrying that Bucky spent the night second guessing all the kisses and half-confessions of the day before.

Fuck, he probably did.

“Shit,” Bucky says, barely resisting the urge to roll his eyes fondly before slipping into Clint’s personal space, tangling his metal fist in the hoodie Clint’s got pulled up over his fantastic bedhead and tugging him down for a sweet, sleepy kiss.

“Mornin’,” he says, because he ought to have led with that, and his smile gets a little smug at the wide-eyed, sleepy way Clint’s blinking down at him, like he doesn’t know what to do with this many feelings this early in the morning.

“It’s not even 10 AM,” Clint tells him, a little plaintively. “Hi.”

“I know,” Bucky says. “I’m gonna make you coffee and then we’re gonna talk.”

“...Talk,” Clint echoes, and then Bucky scoops up the box he’d received the day before and walks into his apartment.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, dropping the package on the counter and turning on Clint’s coffee machine. “See, the thing is, I got this package yesterday, it’s addressed to me and to CupidsToyBox, and when it arrived, JARVIS helpfully told me that it had been scanned by security and they reassured him that it didn’t contain any explosive material, nor did it contain any --” He pulls two mugs out of the cupboard and puts them on the counter, considering his next words, and then says, “-- biological material, unlike the last package you received.”

Clint has collapsed on a stool, watching Bucky and looking like he’d rather be sleeping than dealing with whatever is happening, but he’s making an effort to stay awake, which Bucky appreciates.

“That’s… good?” Clint says, uncertain. “The jizz cookies were really gross. I mean, I didn’t eat them, obviously, but --”

“See, that’s not good,” Bucky tells him. He grabs the milk and the sugar. “That’s the problem here. The fact that you’re getting fan mail that needs to be checked for explosive devices, Clint. Biohazards. Do I even wanna know what’s in that box?”

Clint blinks at the box like he’s just registering that it’s there at all, and his entire face brightens. “Ooh,” he says. “We can do an Unboxing!”

“I don’t know what that is but if it’s a bomb, it probably shouldn’t be unboxed!”

“JARVIS says it’s not a bomb,” Clint says, far too casually as he slides the box over, studying the label and then pressing his ear to it. “And it’s not even ticking.”

“Bombs don’t always -- Jesus, Clint. What if it’s someone who doesn’t want you dating the Winter Soldier? What if it’s Hydra? What if it’s AIM or a hate group or --”

Clint doesn’t appear to be listening, though he flashes a bright, grateful smile when Bucky slides him a mug of perfectly-sugared coffee.

“If it’s a bomb,” he says, “we just won’t post it.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees, with a sinking feeling of inevitability. “Because we’ll be dead.”

“You’ve gotta trust me,” Clint says, downing half his mug of scalding hot coffee in two swallows.

*

“Hi,” Clint says, bright and charming and beaming at the camera. “Welcome to a special Unboxing Edition of Wank-Off Wednesday, in which we will be Unboxing this fantastically mysterious and anonymous package that arrived the other day, which has gone through numerous security screenings and which we have been reassured countless times is neither a bomb nor a biohazard! Before we begin, my illustrious cameraman, Bucky Barnes, aka The Winter Soldier, requests that I inform you all that should we receive any bombs and/or biohazardous material, including but not limited to used sex toys, cookies with jizz in them, or anything you wouldn’t give your own goddamn mother for Mother’s Day, he’s gonna be pissed.”

Clint’s smile grows a little crooked and a little smug. “And, though he’s real hot when he’s angry, you wouldn’t like it.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, and Clint laughs when he catches him doing it. “What?” he says. “It’s true.”

“Just open the damned box,” Bucky says. He’s already got fire extinguishers and other safety devices stashed behind the camera, just in case, though Stark reassured him half a dozen times that there’s no way anything dangerous could sneak by his security systems.

Clint slides the box over, still grinning. “This better be good, guys, for all the pain and suffering I had to go through to get Bucky to agree to this. Okay. Let’s --” he starts tearing at the packaging, chatting about the quality tapemanship, the heavy box, the discrete packaging as he does, and then he’s got it open and he freezes, staring into the box.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh wow, Bucky, you’re gonna -- you’re gonna love this, this is like Christmas -- a really inappropriate Christmas -- oh fuck, Bucky, we can give these to the team for Christmas.”

Bucky’s not sure when Clint decided to talk to _Bucky_ rather than his usual subscribers, or even if Clint realizes he’s doing it, but he also doesn’t specifically mind. He doesn’t talk back, of course, because this is Clint’s thing and Bucky’s just helping out, steadying the camera, and --

And then Clint reaches into the box, almost reverently, with a massive, shit-eating grin on his face, and he pulls out a sex toy, individually packaged and brand new, thank fuck, and. And.

“Is that -- is that Thor’s fucking hammer?” Bucky says, stunned. Horrified.

“Thor’s hammer,” Clint echoes, eyes wide, as he tears the plastic off, “with a giant dildo for a handle.”

He clutches it like it’s something precious and looks up at the camera, eyes wide and shining, and says, “It’s Möan-Inir, Bucky.”

“Oh my god,” Bucky says, unable to help himself. He watches in horrified fascination as Clint continues pulling things out of the box. He knows he’s supposed to be the behind-the-scenes silent help, but he gives up worrying about whether the viewers can hear him because he’s too shocked to contemplate what’s happening. “Is there one for every Avenger?” he asks.

“Yeah, so far,” Clint comments. “There’s Arse Reactor for Tony,” he holds it up, shining red and gold. “Captain Anal for Steve,” Bucky can’t help but crack up at the America-themed butt plug. “Agent Getsmeoff- guys, the Black Widow is _not_ going to be amused that you’ve made a frankly low-end masturbator sleeve for her. You could have gone with something much cooler and more fitting, like bondage gear. Already I’m taking off points.” He keeps digging in the box, and Bucky is terrified of what Clint’s going to pull out next. “Nope,” Clint announces, then hefts a green dildo the size of Bucky’s fucking forearm out of the box. His metal forearm. “That’s gonna be a no from me, guys. Points for calling it the Incredible Dong, though.” There’s more shuffling, and Clint is throwing bubble wrap and bits of brown paper to the side as though Bucky isn’t gonna be the one cleaning that up later.

“Aw yes,” he exclaims, excited. “This- it’s like you guys _know_ me, even if you still don’t know who the fuck I actually am.” He pulls out a black and purple dildo that’s shaped like a very blunt-tipped arrow. “Hawkass Arrow Dildo! It’ll fit an o-ring! Kids, you know what this means?” He grins excitedly at Bucky or the camera, Bucky isn’t sure which. “That means it’ll fit a harness!” Bucky must look as confused as he feels, because Clint takes one look at his face and starts smirking. 

“Long-time viewers may remember that I first came to terms with the idea that I might like guys because I really, really like pegging. And this-” he brandishes the dildo at the camera, “-this is _perfect_ for pegging. Well, theoretically. I haven’t tested it yet.” He winks. 

Setting the dildo aside, lining it up perfectly with the rest of the toys on the table, Clint goes back to his digging, and he rattles around in the box long enough for Bucky to almost start fidgeting. Clint’s brow is furrowed and he’s tossing paper and bubble wrap willy-nilly now, uncaring of where it ends up, until it’s finally obvious that the box is empty.

“Are you guys kidding me right now?” Clint says, obviously disgruntled. He turns the box upside down to demonstrate how empty it is, then drops it off to the side, out of sight of the camera. “You sent me a whole box of Avengers-themed toys, you addressed them to the _Winter Soldier_, and there’s not even a Winter Soldier toy?!” 

He looks utterly scandalized by this complete lack of consideration, but Bucky is frankly relieved. Bucky has less than zero desire for a sex toy fasioned after himself. Clint, on the other hand, is clearly offended on his behalf. 

“The possibilities were _endless_. You could have done _another_ butt plug, I mean I know you have two here, but the Arse Reactor just glows in the dark and the Captain Anal one is a regular silicone butt plug. You could have had a metal one for the Winter Soldier. Or a metal dildo! Or a metal anything, really, let’s be real, you could have done nipple clamps, a vibrator, like really, I’m disappointed. And honestly, Captain America would be disappointed in you. Trust me, I know the guy.”

Bucky groans, putting a hand over his face.

There is no hope that Steve won’t see this video, and the worst part is, Clint’s not _wrong._ Steve _would_ be disappointed there’s no Winter Soldier themed toy, and he’d be doubly disappointed that Sam doesn’t have one either. 

Clint is shaking his head in a very good approximation of Steve’s _how very dare you_ look, the one he gives low-level criminals who have more than mildly inconvenienced him. The same one he gives politicians who try and invite him to events in order to trade on the clout of Captain America. 

Then he shrugs a little and gives the camera a wide smile. “But for now, we’ll work with what we’ve got. I’m _sure_,” he says, a little bit firmly, a little bit like how he sounds in the field when he’s barking out directions from his eyes-in-the-sky perspective, “that there’s a second line up of Avengers toys in the works, and what we have here is just the OG six for testing purposes.” He hefts the _sex toy hammer_, turning it over in his hands. “I guess we’ll find out if Möan-Inir finds us _worthy_.” He snickers, then puts the toy back down. It’s obvious the base is heavy from the sound it makes when it lands on the table, but Clint had lifted it with no problem. 

“So,” he tells the camera, smiling widely enough that the seldom-seen dimple in his left cheek is showing. “This is actually part one of a two part series now! We’ve unboxed the toys, you’ve got my initial first impression, and the next Frisky Friday video will be a Super Hero Special Edition, where you can tune in for my review of everything you see here!”

Clint gives Bucky a little signal, one that means Bucky can turn off the camera, and he does so with relief, hitting stop and setting the camera aside. 

“Well, I think that went pretty well,” Clint starts, leaning over to pick up the bits of paper he’s strewn everywhere as he talks. 

“What’s pegging?” Bucky blurts out, unable to help himself, and Clint pops his head back over the top of the table to look at Bucky. Bucky can feel his face growing hotter by the second, and wishes he could snatch the question back out of the air. 

Clint blinks at him in surprise. “I thought you watched my videos?”

“I didn’t watch _all_ of them,” Bucky grinds out. “Just a few. Mostly the fanmail ones, not the rest.”

“Oh.” Clint scratches his head a little awkwardly, but not like he’s embarrassed. More like he’s thinking about how to explain. “It’s where your partner puts a dildo in a harness and fucks you with it.”

“But wouldn’t my dick feel better?”

Clint stares at him. 

Bucky feels the blood drain out of his face. “A dick,” he babbles, working to salvage the situation. “I meant wouldn’t _a_ dick feel better, oh my god.”

It’s too late though, he can already tell. Clint’s face is transforming from surprise to sly, a grin overtaking his features. 

“Well,” he starts, smirking, “yeah, to both questions.” He leans against the table and crosses his arms over his chest, so Bucky can’t help staring at his biceps. “Yeah, your dick would probably feel better.”

All the blood that had rushed out of Bucky’s face comes flooding back, painting him a brilliant red so hot he can feel it emanating from his skin. “I’m not- I didn’t-”

Clint seems to take pity on him and laughs. “Yeah, we’re not quite there yet, I know.” He saunters forward, more sure of himself and whatever this is between them now than he has been so far. He comes to a stop in front of Bucky and unfolds his arms to rest them on Bucky’s hips. Tilting his head down he kisses Bucky, slow and sweet, until Bucky wraps his arms around Clint’s shoulders and pulls them together tighter, until they’re pressed together from chests to hips and Clint’s arms are wrapped around his waist. The kiss starts off slow but it turns hot, something smoldering beneath the surface until Bucky’s biting at his mouth and tangling his fingers in Clint’s hair and tugging at it, arching into him for something more. 

It’s Clint who slows them down, who eases Bucky back by degrees, loosening the grip of his arms and softening the kisses by increments. They’re both still panting at the end and Bucky is hard as a rock beneath his jeans, but he’s also at his limit and Clint seems to know it. He smiles down at Bucky, fond beneath the arousal on his face, and shifts his hips back a little so that their dicks aren’t pressed together quite so tightly.

Bucky takes a deep breath through his nose and untangles his fingers from Clint’s hair.

Clint’s not wrong about Bucky, after all. He’s not quite ready to take that final plunge, however ready his cock feels in his pants right now, or however much the arousal in his blood is screaming at him. 

He’s definitely not ready to help Clint experiment with sex toys. 

Clint kisses him again, quick and chaste - on the lips, at the corner of his mouth, on his forehead and his eyelids - and then he steps back entirely, letting Bucky go. He takes a shaky breath and wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand and it’s obvious he’s trying to give Bucky the space he needs, even though he’s practically shaking with arousal and his eyes are dark with want. 

He moves around behind the table to continue picking up the trash.

Bucky collapses back onto his little stool, breathing hard.

“Hey,” Clint says, after a second. “You want any of these?” He gestures at the toys still scattered over the table. 

“Absolutely not,” Bucky says immediately. 

Clint snickers at whatever expression is on his face. “More for me,” he shrugs.

Bucky eyes the Incredible Dong dubiously. 

“Yeah,” Clint says, sighing, “probably not that one.”

_Probably?_ Bucky’s eyebrows are so far up he can feel them near his hair. 

“I mean…” Clint chews on his lip. “With a lot of prep and lube…” he trails off.

Bucky tries not to think about that, and mostly he fails. 

Well, there goes his whole evening. 

*

By the time Friday rolls around, Bucky has thought entirely too much about what Clint may or may not have been doing with the box of Avengers toys they’d got in the mail. He’s thought about it so much that he’s made a pretty significant dent in the bottle of lube in his room, and he’s… made some ventures into uncharted territory that haven’t gone horribly wrong. He’s also spent a lot of time cozied up with Clint on the couch, watching movies or playing games and just generally doing all the same things they’ve always done, but with bonus snuggles and a lot of kissing.

They’re just starting to add groping to their repertoire, and Bucky isn’t unhappy with the development. 

So when Clint texts Bucky and asks him to come up to his place for Frisky Friday, Bucky goes with a bounce in his step and a curling of warmth in his chest.

Except, when he gets there, the camera is set up on a shiny new tripod, and Clint’s waiting for him on a stool, the toys back on the table the same as they were the week before. 

“So you don’t have to,” Clint starts, seeing the look on Bucky’s face. “But I thought - if you wanted - you could sit in today. Or lurk in the background and stare murderously at the camera so the viewers don’t get the wrong idea, whatever floats your boat. I just wanted to give you the option.”

Bucky thinks about it. He’s come down in jeans and a henley again, and his hair is up and as presentable as it ever gets. He’s definitely not going to _participate._ He doesn’t have a thing to say - _he_ hasn’t spent the last few days testing out toys. But the idea of sitting in the background reminding everyone of just who they might be pissing off _does_ appeal to him, a little bit. Steve’s press statement hasn’t cooled vultures off at all, in fact it only seemed to egg them on, so Bucky’s just about given up on his private life being private anytime ever, and if he’s going to have this much attention on his relationship, he might as well have it be on his own terms. 

So he sits behind Clint, just at the edge of where he knows the camera will reach, quietly tying Clint’s bondage rope into intricate knots for storage and periodically recalibrating his arm so that the camera can pick up the whirring, clicking noises it makes, just in case anyone thought he wasn’t the real deal, while Clint chatters about the toys. The Incredible Dong, it turns out, was ultimately a no, which leaves Bucky feeling oddly relieved. The plugs were fine, so far as Bucky can tell, although Clint is going into detail about the materials and curve of them. He tunes out Clint’s review of the fleshlight because he honestly_ does not want to know,_ and evidently the angle of Möan-Inir is a little bit awkward for its intended purpose. Then Clint rhapsodizes poetic about the arrow dildo, thrilled with the suction cup attachment and the curve near the end and a whole host of things that makes Bucky flush as he wonders if he _should_ have offered to help test out the toys. 

On Clint. 

When Clint’s done, though, he stands up and turns the camera off, then comes over to survey Bucky’s handiwork before snorting in amusement. There’s a half-dozen coils of rope, all neatly rolled and knotted off, and if they look maybe a bit like a hangman’s noose, that’s sheer coincidence. Honest. 

Clint pulls him to his feet and into a deep kiss, thorough and lazy. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Clint informs him, when they part.

“You like it,” Bucky shoots back, fingers tightening on Clint’s hips.

“Yeah,” he agrees, smiling. “I kinda do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to Amy for the truly excellent beta read that was so much more than we deserved!
> 
> P.S. The Avenger themed sex toys are real and can be found through googling Avenger themed sex toys ;)
> 
> P.P.S. - CB used this fic in Clint Barton Bingo for 'secret relationship'


End file.
